Mass Effect Collection: The Final Frontier
by RYNO IV
Summary: The Abyssals drove them to the brink, and then they were driven back themselves. With the planet's resources running out and nowhere else to turn to, humanity looks to the final frontier - space. They bring with them all they have, even their Shipgirls... but the rest of the galaxy isn't a kind place to look for a new home. With new enemies on the horizon, can they survive?
1. Events In Motion

_So! After a massive rush of shit to the brain, I came up with this. KanColle... urgh, I don't know what to think of it. I don't know if it's utterly brilliant, or utterly shit. The concept behind it is fantastic, when you think about the spiritual aspect of it. But the anime. That f-in' anime._

 _It's like they took memes, doujins, fanart, historical jokes, and topped it off with the game itself and threw it all in a blender._

 _This thing could be fantastic. Seriously, what the hell? Get your shit together!._

 _Anyway, this is my response to_ Death Knight 1993's _challenge, which has the following rules:_

 _1: Shipgirl Shepard_

 _2: Systems Alliance Tech must be unusual or exotic (i.e., gauss, particle, gravity-based weapons)_

 _3: Non-Turian First Contact_

 _4: Shipgirls are unique to humanity, or at least at first_

 _I also add my own rules to this, the second of which was suggested to me:_

 _5: The Abyssals drive humanity off their homeworld_

 _6: The Abyssals are connected somehow to the Reapers_

 _Anyway, this will be my first crossover attempt. I have a good grasp of KanColle and some headcanon I've got going, which I'll post in the second chapter. What I need is a refresher on Mass Effect - it's been a good two years since I played ME3. If any of you guys could point me to some primers, maybe some youtube cutscene movies, that would be awesome. I need a good grasp on the characters as well. Garrus is just too awesome, I don't want to mess him up._

 _I hope you enjoy._

 _-RYNO_

 _PS: I would like to leave it up to you guys what ships humanity develops. I have two in mind so far - the Rorqual from EVE Online and the Wells-class ship by Do-Mo on Deviantart, but I need more. Humanity doesn't develop strictly down the Element Zero line. What I'm looking for are ships that are bulky, heavy, industrial, or just plain ugly. Focused on function rather than form, right? They can be anywhere between a fighter to upwards of four kilometers, but no larger than that._

 _Remember, the uglier the better._

 _I would also like ideas for a suitably large space station, since humans get driven off Earth. With how shit goes down with the Abyssal War and how many get off Earth in the first place, there are only around 1.5 billion humans left. Still a lot but there's 7.2 billion alive today, just to put it into perspective._

* * *

The Admiral sighed as he looked over the final action report. It had been nearly a week after the battle… _the_ battle, and they were still tallying the damage. They were successful, true, but at what cost?

Yokosuka Naval Base had come under a strange, serene calm. Perfect blue skies stretched on forever, the salty air pungent, cold, yet refreshing all the same. Everyone who lived on base carved out a life for themselves – Mamiya's was open every day, the supply shipgirl more than happy to sell her wares. The bathhouse was seldom unoccupied, and the mess hall always open and ready to serve food. Dull thuds that reverberated in the Admiral's gut were the telltale sign of large caliber naval cannons firing in the training yard. Today would not have been different from any other day…

Except that it was. Things would never be the same.

In the weeks following the battle at the Abyssal AF base, Yokosuka was beset upon by Abyssal fleets from as far out as Hawai'i, the sheer number of them pushing them back from Truk Base. There was no strategy, no overarching war plan – it was a fight for their lives, plain and simple. In the confusion of the retreat from Truk Base, Kuma-class cruiser Kitakami was shelled by an Abyssal Ta-class battleship and sunk. Kuma-class cruiser Oi, disregarding orders from her superior, charged the approaching Abyssal Fleet and vanished into the fire. She was never seen again, but radar would show that she lasted well into the night, only losing contact after ramming an Abyssal.

Abyssal vessels pushed further and further to Yokosuka, finally coming within visual range on December 7th, 2070. The Yokosuka fleet was able to defeat the lead Abyssals but were forced to retreat when reinforcements arrived, only after giving the acting Admiral enough time to evacuate the base. On December 9th, 2070 at 0532 hours, Abyssal carriers carpet bombed Yokosuka. Of the sixty-seven fleet girls that Yokosuka fielded, only twenty-nine were able to rendezvous for the retreat, the rest out on patrol and forced to relocate to Magadan in the Sea of Okhotsk. Luckily, none had been damaged and escape the Abyssal Fleet's rampage, and assumed complete control of the Sea of Okhotsk.

The former Yokosuka fleet retreated to Shanghai, suffering from crippled morale once it was known that Mutsuki-class destroyer, Mutsuki, had refused to retreat. She was last seen at the Fleet Girl Memorial by Fubuki-class destroyer, Fubuki. In addition to that, Yamato-class battleship, Yamato, had been acting as rear guard in the retreat and took the brunt of the enemies' fire, damaging her keel – analogous to the human spine, paralyzing her. Even with the use of instant repair buckets, it would take an estimated five years, two months, fourteen days, and eighteen hours to repair her, now impossible due to the fact that Shanghai lacked a dedicated repair dock for Shipgirls.

Lacking the fleet's flagship and several destroyers, the Yokosuka fleet were forced to defend the city from encroaching Abyssal ships. Over the course of three months, the Yokosuka fleet sank eight Abyssal carriers, twenty-three battleships, fifty-four cruisers, and one-hundred and nineteen destroyers, including the Abyssal Battleship Princess, at the cost of severely damaging Shipgirls Nagato, Mutsu, Atago, Fubuki, Akagi, Kongo, Tama, and sinking Kuma-class cruiser Kuma.

At this point, of the original Yokosuka fleet's twenty-nine members, five Shipgirls had been sunk and eight severely damaged with no way to repair them, leaving the fleet with only sixteen Shipgirls, with even more Abyssal ships approaching from as far off as the Americas and Australia. In addition, the Yokosuka fleet had to contend with dissatisfied citizens, concerned that they weren't doing as good a job as they should have.

The Admiral was sad to say that at that point even his spirit was broken. The situation was hopeless, with multiple Shipgirls outright refusing to fight anymore.

And then, a breakthrough. In the month-long lull between the Battle of Shanghai and the arrival of more Abyssal fleets, the Shanghai Advanced Research Institute finished a project that had been in progress since the start of the Abyssal War, entirely in secret – the completion of a working particle cannon. At the onset of the Second Battle of Shanghai, wherein only Kaga, Jintsuu, and Naka sortied, SARI appealed to the Chinese government and requisitioned six hundred thirty-two thousand, three hundred and eighty-four megawatts of electricity – the estimated power consumption of China over one hour. With the power of the entire country behind it, the particle cannon, relocated to the top of the Shanghai Tower, fired on the Abyssal fleet nearly twenty miles offshore. The particle beam impacted the water's surface and exploded with the force of over 300 kilotons of TNT, devastating the Australian Abyssal Fleet and boiling over five hundred thousand gallons of seawater. During the Second Battle of Shanghai, only a single torpedo spread was fired.

However, the barrel of the particle cannon completely melted, forcing repairs and redesign.

This was the turning point of the war. With the Zeus Particle Cannon in place on top of the Shanghai Tower, SARI constructed a second, lower yield particle cannon that would only require ten thousand megawatts to fire. Meanwhile, the Yokosuka fleet had been given aid from SARI with an improvised repair dock, and the return of damaged Shipgirls significantly boosted morale. With Yamato out of commission for the foreseeable future, the next plan of attack was to retake Yokosuka and reestablish control over the Pacific – unfortunately, it had been taken over by a second Airfield Princess and used as a forward operating base for the Abyssals, and thus too dangerous for a frontal assault . It was at this point that the Yokosuka Fleet gained a new member – Major Misato Okita, an officer from the former JSSDF.

With Major Okita assisting Secretary Nagato, the Yokosuka Fleet was able to come up with an audacious plan – mount the newly constructed Archimedes positron cannon on a barge and pull it out to sea with a tugboat, and use it as a mobile artillery platform to assault Yokosuka. Using the twenty-four Shipgirls' boilers as generators, the Archimedes cannon fired on Yokosuka fifteen miles offshore, well out of range and safe from retaliation. Major Okita fired ten low-power shots, decimating the Abyssal forces at Yokosuka.

In the coming months, the Yokosuka Fleet would rebuild Yokosuka Naval Base under the protection of the Archimedes cannon, preventing any Abyssal from coming close. Battleship Yamato was able to be brought home and placed in stasis, where she would wait out her long repair period in her sleep. Additionally, an assault on the former Truk Base rooted out a poorly constructed Abyssal garrison, giving the Yokosuka Fleet a base to operate out of the Philippines once more.

Now that Japan was safe once more, the rest of the Yokosuka fleet returned from Magadan, much to the joy of the Shipgirls, and morale soared once more despite the losses they'd had.

With most of the Asian seas now under human control, it was time to determine just how much territory the Abyssals controlled. Most Abyssal presence in the Southern Hemisphere was based around Australia, which had become completely overrun and far too dangerous to approach despite the loss of its fleet. Africa, lacking its own navy, had only a few garrisons around the peninsula, which were eliminated by the Exploration Fleet consisting of Kongo, Hiei, Haruna, Kirishima, Taka, Akagi, Yuudachi, Shimakaze, and flagship Fubuki. The coast would later be reinforced with additional Archimedes positron cannon emplacements, which had become the sole human-made weapon effective against the Abyssals, aside from the Zeus cannon still stationed in Shanghai. With Africa safely under human control, the Exploration Fleet traveled up the Atlantic Ocean to Europe, to find another shipgirl fleet stationed out of the Lisbon Port, capital of Portugal.

With Lisbon under heavy siege from an Abyssal fleet, the Exploration fleet assisted the local Shipgirls in driving back the enemy. The Lisbon fleet was woefully underpowered, with only the España-class battleship, España, Mendez Nunez-class cruiser, Nunez, and the Almirante Cerverva-class cruiser, Cerverva defending the port, with all others having already been sunk.

The Exploration stayed in Lisbon for several months while the city was rebuilt and an Archimedes cannon built and shipped out to defend the port, whereupon España, Nunez, and Cerverva joined the fleet in their continuing journey north.

Once in European waters, the Exploration Fleet encountered the largest shipgirl presence yet. The Royal Navy, consisting of the Britsh Pacific Fleet, were combined with the German Kreigsmarine and had been highly successful in pushing out the Abyssal presences, taking back the entirety of the British Isles and the North and Baltic Seas, allowing minor maritime trade once again, despite the tensions between the two shipgirl fleets.

Acting as a mediator, the Exploration Fleet managed to get the two fleets to cooperate and shared the status of the Pacific with German and British Admirals, as well as informing them of the positron cannon. Britain and Germany immediately commissioned dozens of the cannons after seeing footage of their effectiveness, mounting them along the coast of Norway, the Netherlands, Germany, the United Kingdom, Ireland, France, and Spain, as well as cooperating to commission more to place along the coast of Africa, India, and Indonesia to help curb the threat from Australia. Multiple emplacements were installed along the coast of Russia as well, not having access or the resources to Shipgirls as other nations.

With their borders secure, the fleet admirals and Major Okita reestablished communications with the allied countries to come up with a plan and start pushing back the Abyssal threat even more. While Australia was confirmed to be an Abyssal hotspot, the same could not be said of the Americas, which had been determined to be the source of most major Abyssal offenses in both the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.

With the entire coast of the Atlantic Ocean secure, it was decided that the Royal Navy and Kreigsmarine would rendezvous at the Yokosuka naval base, regroup at Truk Base, and push from the Pacific to determine just how far the Abyssal presence had spread. This plan would be called Operation Pacifica, the largest naval sortie in history, consisting of one hundred and seventy-six Shipgirls, fourteen replenishment Shipgirls, and twenty barges stocked with munitions and food supplies. One additional barge was equipped with an Archimedes cannon, but would only be operable if there were Shipgirls to power it. Following from the rear would be the Yokosuka Base Admiral and Major Okita in the JDS Kongo, a modern missile destroyer, both to provide mission support and logistics.

To say that Kongo disliked the destroyer would be an understatement.

The combined forces of three different countries' navies was called the Coalition of Fleets, the largest since the Allies of World War II.

The first base they found was on Kauai, a mere garrison meant to warn the rest of the Abyssal forces. With no human left alive on the islands to worry about, Kauai disappeared under a hail of shells and missiles. O'ahu, Moloka'i, and Maui were successfully assaulted and cleansed of all Abyssal presence. However, it was the island of Hawai'i itself that things turned.

An Airfield Princess had taken up residence in the island… that is to say, she became the island itself. Hawai'i itself had been assimilated by the Princess, becoming a living organism. The skies were thick with the Princess's drones, the Princess seemingly invincible due to the sheer size of the island, in addition to the dozens of Abyssal ships protecting her.

In the chaos, the slower Shipgirls of the British Pacific Fleet were hit hard. Many were injured by the sheer number of bombs and bullets, sinking nearly a dozen destroyers, cruisers, and even sunk the Old Lady herself, Warspite – however, only after taking a spread of torpedoes meant for the JDS Kongo, the Abyssals having sensed the humans aboard.

The Kriegsmarine Fleet was hit hard as well, losing half a dozen cruisers and injuring nearly half the fleet.

The Yokosuka Fleet was perhaps the only fleet that made any headway. Nearly their entire squadron of destroyers mounted a coordinated strike on the Abyssal ships, launching hundreds of torpedoes that devastated the Abyssals. This action rallied the remaining fleets, and they thinned the aircraft enough that the carriers could launch bombers on the Princess.

Hundreds of fighters dropped their payload on the island, not leaving a single piece of land untouched, yet the Princess still sent more fighters in the air. In a second coordinated attack, the fleet's entire complement of cruisers, destroyers, and battleships fired their cannons on the island, expending hundreds of shells over the course of a minute. Finally, the entire island exploded, signaling the end of the Abyssal.

After the battle, it was found that eight of the British Pacific Fleet's ships had been sunk, with thirty-six of the fleet's original seventy-one damaged. The Kreigsmarine suffered massive damage, 23 of their destroyers sunk by bombs, with all but the Bismarck having taken damage. The Yokosuka Fleet had fared much better, having lost no ships, yet over fifty Shipgirls had taken damage in one form or another. The amount of damage that the Princess had dished out was shocking, and thoroughly demoralized the fleet.

It was determined that they would return to Yokosuka and Shanghai to repair and rearm, but before they would leave, light carrier Shokaku sent out a flight of recon planes to scout out the ocean they hadn't crossed yet.

This decision would change the entire course of the war.

The waters approaching the Americas were absolutely infested with Abyssal ships, far too many to count. More than that however, the planes had been able to fly high enough to see the coast of Alaska and Canada. What they saw was shocking – Abyssals had absorbed themselves into the land, turning the ground itself into Abyssal factories. Belching smog high into the sky, the land itself was churning out Abyssal after Abyssal.

The news was shared even mid-transit back to Yokosuka.

Upon returning, the Admiral commissioned SARI to build as many Archimedes cannons as they could, and pushed the docks in both Yokosuka and Shanghai to repair the fleet's Shipgirls as fast as they would allow.

With a sigh, the Admiral poured himself a glass of whiskey before taking it down in a single gulp. A week had passed since the news that put a shiver down his spine, and he still hadn't revealed it. He'd even sworn Shokaku to secrecy, threatening to scrap her should she reveal what she saw to anyone. This would change everything – _had_ changed everything – and he needed to take stock of what they had to counter this new threat… if there was anything that even could.

SARI had already pushed out a trio of Archimedes cannons. One would be emplaced on Maui, with the other two going north to defend against their largest weakness at the moment – Alaska. Should they fail to barricade that stretch of sea, Abyssal ships would sweep down from the north like a plague.

What concerned him even more than that, however, were their dwindling supplies. Resources were still coming in, sure, but they had to venture further and further away from the base and into China itself. Within a few decades they would be strip mining Africa, and then… they'd be spent. Humanity would be finished.

The Admiral clenched his fist. He refused for this to be the final generation of humanity. He refused to simply lay down and die at the Abyssal's feet, either. Zeus was their first game changer. The Coalition of Fleets was the second. What would be the third?

He leaned back in his chair, spinning to face the sky. Perhaps the clouds would give him the answer…

The Admiral snorted.

Maybe he could requisition mining rights in Russia – if he could get his hands on some bauxite veins, the carriers would be able to launch hundreds of squadrons, with thousands of fighters, with hundreds of thousands of bombs. But… there had to be another way.

His options were to fight, or flee. But with nowhere else to flee to, they had no choice but to fight, and fighting simply wasn't an option for anything other than a massacre.

The Admirals gaze was distant, lost in the sky before he snapped back to the present and gave the sky a critical glare.

…Or did he have an option?

He thought, remembering times before the war, and a massive grin split his bearded face. If he remembered correctly, the answer to their problems was right over their heads.

-O-O-O-

The Admiralty Board, once the center for the defense of all of Britain, had only been reinstated in the last two months. With the Abyssal threat curbed, the state of emergency had been lifted over downtown London and trade across Europe had been reestablished, returning much of the country to life as it was before the Abyssal outbreak. That said, London was under reconstruction from the near two decades of neglect, and under the pale clouds the sound of buildings being torn down and repaired could be heard all across the city.

The Old War Office, located on Whitehall Court, had once been where Winston Churchill himself had managed the British Army. While it had been moved to the Ministry of Defense, the War Office had been repurposed into where the Admiralty Board met once a year to discuss the status of the military. Now that the government had been reestablished and contact with outside countries restored, the British Admiralty Board grew to include Japan, Germany, Spain, France, Russia, China, Eastern Europe, India, and Italy, both as a place to discuss military but also domestic and governmental matters. Here, the Admirals, de facto leaders of their countries, made themselves heard on what they needed and what had to be done.

Needless to say, much of it was bickering. These nine men and one woman were seated at a round table, in a brightly lit room with one wall overlooking the street below. The fanciful casing in the walls was lost on them as their tempers flared.

It was much like children, sad to say.

"If we don't get more Archimedes shipments soon, the Abyssals will overrun us once more!" the German admiral shouted, a wiry man wearing a grey overcoat and an officer's cap. "Our coast is completely exposed!"

The Italian Admiral snorted and shook his head. _"Almeno hai Archimede,"_ he muttered, looking frail and thin in his grey suit _. "Noi non abbiamo nemmeno il cibo."_

" _You're_ short on food?" the Chinese Admiral asked incredulously, his military uniform wrinkled and unpressed. "We need metal, water, food – China is still the largest nation in the world, we need supplies more than anyone!"

The Russian Admiral, a heavyset man that strained the buttons of his fur-lined greatcoat, groaned and tiredly dropped his head in his hands. " _Bozhe moi,"_ he grumbled in a deep bariton. _"Volka nogi kormyat._ Resources are scarce, friend. War does not make good times."

"We would have supplies if your so-called 'Shipgirls' did not eat the equivalent of Shanghai!"

The Spainsh Admiral snorted and adjusted his glasses. "So what would you suggest us do?" he asked. "Scrap them?"

"Yes."

The entire table looked at the man in shock.

"Think about it!" the Chinese Admiral shouted, throwing his hands in the air. "We have a weapon effective against the Abyssals! It is time to consolidate resources and remove the chaff."

The German pounded his fists against the table and shot to his feet. "To scrap them means to _kill_ them!" he barked. "I will not have the ones who've given us a chance to fight back simply tossed aside!"

Much to the German's anger, the Italian slowly got to his feet as well. "I vote they be decommissioned as well. We cannot afford to supply them any longer."

With the Admiralty Board divided, the room erupted in enraged shouting.

The only one who remained seat was the Yokosuka Admiral, the Japanese representative. A man in his late forties, his hair and beard had prematurely gone to white while his black uniform all but hung off his tall, wiry frame. His eyes were shadowed by the officer's cap on his head, and his expression undiscernible as he loosened the white scarf around his neck. With a deep breath, the Admiral got to his feet and glared at the squabbling men.

 _Things were so much simpler when it was just Yokosuka,_ he thought to himself.

The sight of the usually passive man caused the argument around him to slowly die, starting with the German, and slowly the room quieted until the echoes of their screaming match stopped reverberating between the walls. It was quiet enough that they could hear each other breathing.

"Gentlemen," the Admiral said, "we have a more important situation on our hands."

The Chinese scoffed. "What is more important than what we were discussing? Shipgirls aren't necessary anymore –"

" _When I want your opinion I will ask for it,"_ the Admiral snarled, his eyes seeming to glow red under his cap and the sudden anger stunning the Chinese into silence.

The Admiral held his glare for a moment longer before he reached inside his coat and pulled out a manila folder, gently setting on the table. "We owe everything to the Shipgirls. If not for them, we would have ended up like the Americas."

This statement confused all of them. "But, we haven't heard from them!" the Russian protested.

"And you wouldn't have," the Admiral stated. "Gentlemen, we can't get rid of the Shipgirls simply because, if we kill them now, the Abyssals will know we will be weak, and they will come for blood."

The Chinese had recovered himself, and laughed. "You speak of those _things_ like they are alive. You forget that they are weapons. And how would the Abyssals come for blood? The only other assaults are coming from across the seas."

The Admiral glared at the Chinese. "Those _things_ are living, breathing souls, and you dishonor them and what they represent."

The Chinese scoffed and looked away.

It was just as well, and the Admiral pushed the infuriating man out of his mind as he continued, "Now, I must clarify. You are correct in that the assaults are coming from across the seas. But, they are from the Americas."

Now this was enough to keep even the Chinese from speaking. The silence was heavy enough that they could hear a clock ticking from the next room.

The Frenchman gulped, nervous and sweating. "N-now, when you say from the Americas… do you mean the _Americans_ are responsible for the Abyssals?"

The Admiral shook his head, and all of them breathed a sigh of relief. "No, what I mean is that the Abyssals have _taken over_ the Americas. If you had read my report, you would have read that the Airfield Abyssal on Hawai'I island had assimilated itself _into_ the island, and was using the island itself as material for its planes."

The Italian, Chinese, Frenchman, and Spaniard looked incredibly sheepish.

The Admiral ignored this. "The same has happened to the Americas. Light carrier Shokaku sent up a recon squadron as we retreated, and this folder contains the pictures her planes took."

He tossed the folder across the table, spilling the contents out. The other Admirals had reach for one, but what they saw shocked them – the coastline and surrounding waters of the Pacific Ocean turned a disgusting, fleshy grey, too far to make out any details, but enough to see that the grey stretched from Alaska all the way down to California, at least from what they could interpret after piecing the pictures together.

"Admirals, there are literally hundreds of thousands of Abyssal ships between us and the Americas," he said gravely. "We cannot defeat them."

His words made the Admirals panic, and amid their confused gibbering the German shouted, "But if we cannot defeat them, then what was the point of constructing the Fleet Girls?!"

The Admiral raised his cap slightly, revealing the shadow of his eyes, and was enough to silence the men around him once more. "We cannot defeat them _yet._ Our Shipgirls are not enough to defeat them on their own. We need supplies, first and foremost. We need to incorporate the Archimedes cannon into their weaponry, and lastly, we need to secure our borders. We simply do not have the strength at this time to continue pushing into Abyssal territory."

"I-incorporate the Archimedes into those _things!?"_ the Chinese gaped. "Are you _mad?!_ What if they turn on us? We need to keep the Archimedes under _our_ control!"

" _They are not the enemy!"_ the Admiral roared, making the lot of them flinch. "They have served us time and time again, both in this life and their last. In fact, the only enemy I see before me is _you!"_

The Chinese fell back in his seat, gaping the ferocity the Admiral was leveling at him.

The Admiral huffed, before he let out a long sigh.

Suddenly the door behind him banged open, and with a squealing of shoes Secretary Ship Nagato skidded to a stop, her eyes frantic as she searched for her admiral. Her eyes widened when she saw him, relief spreading across her normally stern features as she demanded, "Admiral sir, are you alright? I heard you yelling."

She quickly strode to the Admiral, ignoring the men gaping at her short skirt as she made sure her Admiral was unharmed.

The Admiral nodded. "I'm fine, Nagato. Thank you."

The Shipgirl nodded, throwing a stern glare at the Admirals before she spun on her heel and stalked out of the room, slamming the door closed behind her.

The Chinese seemed to snap awake. "W-was that –"

"Yes," The Admiral said. "The battleship Nagato. Laid down on the twenty-eighth of August, nineteen seventeen, launched on the ninth of November, nineteen nineteen. Used for _target practice,"_ he said with derision, "on the twenty-fifth of July, nineteen forty-six. And reincarnated in the body of Maya Ibuki, resident of Tokyo."

Such news would have shocked most people… yet these men were all too aware how a Shipgirl was constructed. To them, it was simply old news, yet to have a face to the name was thoroughly humbling.

"So all the Shipgirls that sunk…" the Chinese trailed off.

The Admiral nodded. "Yes. They have died for a second time… but their spirits live on, as long as we remember them."

He turned back to the other Admirals. "But we're getting off topic. What you see before you," he motioned at the pictures, "is similar to what we saw on Hawai'i, but on a much grander scale. The assimilated Airfield Abyssal used resources on the island to make and deploy dozens of drones. With our calculations based on that and the amount of territory the Abyssals have taken, they are able to field one hundred and fifty vessels every _minute._ "

The Admirals paled.

"And this is assuming they haven't taken South America as well," the Admiral said with a sardonic chuckle.

The Russian opened and closed his mouth several times, before seemingly deflating in his coat. _"Chort vozmi."_

The Admiral snorted. "Quite. We do not have the resources to deal with this threat, or any way to prepare ourselves."

The Chinese was terrified, shaking in his seat as he placed a palm on the table to steady himself. "But, but what of the Archimedes? They have been successful!"

"Only because the Abyssals have not fielded an armada large enough to overwhelm them," the Admiral said gravely. "It is a pinpoint weapon, at best. It cannot cause the same level of destruction as the Zeus, and SARI has been unable to replicate it. It is effective, but even it would eventually be overwhelmed if we were attacked. We have around two decades worth of natural resources, and then our planet will be spent. "

The German stared at the picture in his hands before finally tossing it aside, and leaned back in his chair with his hands supporting the back of his head. "So humanity is finished," he muttered.

"No."

The other Admirals eyed the Yokosuka native, taking in just how rigid he stood, and the conviction in his voice.

"We _will not_ die to the Abyss."

For a brief, brief moment, they almost believed him.

"How?" the Frenchman asked. "As you just said, we can't ready ourselves for an all-out attack, and the Abyssals have no concept of just that outside of ambush tactics. What are we supposed to do, negotiate with them?"

The absurdity of his statement made them all give pained chuckles, reminded of how disastrous the first days of the Abyssal Wars were.

Again, the Admiral shook his head. "Before the start of all this, the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology worked closely with the JSSDF and Johnathan Manswell, CEO of Manswell Industries. If you remember, his corporation was the leading head of extrasolar technologies in the States. It has been so long that it only occurred to me a week ago, but this," he said, pulling a thumb drive from his pocket, "is what will save humanity."

He opened a panel in the table, revealing a small keyboard and slot to insert the drive. Plugging it in, he typed in a rapid-fire command that opened a circular compartment in the center of the table, where a bulky projector sat. It gave a shrill whine before it came to life, projecting a holographic image of a… _thing,_ into the air.

The German frowned, and folded his hands in front of his mouth. "What is this?"

The Admiral steeled himself. Depending on his actions in the next few minutes could very well decide the fate of humanity, and he refused to allow his species to fade to dust. He gestured at the hologram, and said, "This, my friends, is the Rorqual. She was designed as a mining ship, back during when interstellar travel was still controversial. She will save us from our fate."

The Rorqual was a massive ship, to scale of course, but the scale was measured in kilometers – as it was, the hologram took up half of the entire table. The bulky ship was four kilometers in length, the hull in a rough T-shape, with her engines across the horizontal arm. Massive containers were at her sides that could hold millions of tons of materials, enough that made the Admirals salivate at the possibilities. She was a spaceship, something that tickled every one of their childish fantasies.

But then the pin dropped.

"This ship, this _spaceship_ , vhere is it?" the German asked skeptically, his accent coming out in full. "And vhy have we not heard of it before now? Does it even _exist?"_

"We have no use for a blueprint, we need solutions!" the Chinese bellowed.

"If we don't even have the resources to support ourselves, how do you expect us to build something like this?!"

The room was about to devolve into angered shouting once more, before the Admiral raised his hands in supplication. "Admirals, the Rorqual _does_ exist. It was constructed in space before the Abyssals attacked, and has been above our heads for the last twenty years. She is fully functional – she was to undergo her first voyage, but the Abyssals came two weeks ahead of that time. All she requires is final maintenance checks and superficial construction, but she is ready and waiting for us."

A small voice at the end of the table coughed, and the Eastern European Admiral, who had yet to speak, cleared her throat before politely asking, "Why did we not try to use her before?"

The Admiral sighed – he knew that the woman had only been instated as an Admiral a few years before, and so was not as up to speed as the rest of them. "We did. Almost all of our aircraft and military vessels were destroyed by the Abyssals during the first year or so, and any rockets we sent up into orbit were shot down. But now that we've retaken this half of the world, we can send up shuttles. We can start to rebuild."

The room was silent for a long moment, and then, with a scraping of his chair on the floor, the German Admiral got to his feet and set his hat on the table. "…No other plans have worked," he began. "Fighting does not work, running does not work. And waiting them out will not work. I believe this is our best option."

He straightened his posture, and clasped his hands behind his back. "I say we go forward with this plan."

Quickly following him was the Russian, who tottered to his feet with a great wobble of his belly. "I will not see our Mother Russia reduced to some monstrosity. I say we go forward with the Rorqual."

The Italian shot from his chair. _"Lo voto per il Rorqual!"_ he squeaked.

The Admiral felt a sense of relief – that was three votes already.

The Chinese stared, mouth gaping.

The Frenchman got to his feet. _"Oui."_

The Indian representative – who the Admiral forgot was even there – got to his feet and gave a silent nod, followed by the Spaniard.

"This is foolishness!" the Chinese bellowed. He had been watching as, one by one, his fellow admirals were suckered in by this fool's errand and couldn't contain his growing anger any longer. "A ship waiting to be used? Ha! It's too convenient; this can only be a trick!"

The admirals stared at him at the Chinese berated them.

"I will not stand for this!" he raved. "I always knew that this Admiralty Board would fail. We will only survive if we hold the line! I, for one, will not let my country be swayed by fool's errands."

He stepped back from the table. "China hereby removes itself from the Admiralty. Good luck with the Abyssals."

The man then turned and strode out the door, not even sparing a glance back as he slammed it behind him.

With a disappointed shake of his head, the Admiral muttered, _"Bakame,"_ under his breath, before he turned back to the tables. "With that out of the way, we have another problem. How do we get up there?"

There was a long pause before the Frenchman and the Indian looked at each other and sighed. "We do not have launch capability," the Frenchman said. "Our rockets were dismantled for resources."

The Eastern European frowned as well. "I remember our rockets being strapped with explosives and launched on the Abyssals. It… failed, spectacularly. Baghdad is _still_ a crater."

It was the Admiral's turn to disappoint them. "Japan has the same issue. We launched our rockets with explosive warheads… it didn't work," he said hesitantly.

When they turned to the Russian, they were surprised to see the normally jovial man sitting there with a blank expression, staring at nothing. And then, he chuckled. A wry grin spread across his face, and his chuckles grew into an unstoppable peal of laughter that echoed off the walls, stunning the other Admirals.

The Russian swept a hand through his wispy hair. "I-I apologize," he managed to spit out between laughs, tears streaming from his eyes. "It is just- I cannot believe that history would repeat itself like, like _this!"_

With the Admirals waiting for him to clarify, the Russian, still wracked with chuckles, managed to say, "In World War II, the Eastern Front was why Germany fell… no offense to you, of course."

The German gave a respectful nod.

"We of Mother Russia are proud, to this day, of that," he continued. "And now, we are in a position to lead the charge again."

He grinned. "We have six Tsyklon-5 rockets in storage, and we have the equipment to set up command control in the Kremlin."

A collective sigh of relief ran through the Admirals.

"Are they launch capable?" the Admiral asked.

The Russian stroked his chin in thought, tossling his beard before he nodded. " _Da._ We have been maintaining them – they only require final maintenance checks, and then they will be ready."

At those words, the Admiral felt calmer than he'd ever had before, even before the Abyssals. Despite his doubts, he'd succeeded. The Admiralty listened to him, and accepted his words. They would survive. China was a massive loss, likely taking their Archimedes production with them, but JAIST had worked with them enough to get their hands on the blueprints to the weapon. They could replicate them, possibly even improve on them now that SARI wasn't in control now. He had no doubt that China would raise a fuss, but now that their admiral had withdrawn from the Admiralty Board, they would have no say in what would happen in the coming months.

The Admiral let himself sink in his chair in relief as his fellow admirals discussed just what needed to happen to get the rockets ready for launch, satisfied that he'd been able to win a decisive battle against the Abyssals.


	2. Defined by the Past

December, 2071: The New Hope mission is launched, sending six manned Tsyklon-5 rockets into Earth orbit. Between them they carry thirty crewmen and a disassembled Wells-class spacecraft, christened the _Dawn._ Construction of the craft is expected to be completed within two months.

December, 2071: After a long rest, the Fleet Girl project is given plans for a complete overhaul – most, if not all, Shipgirls will be given modernization upgrades to their outfit and possibly their bodies on consent. However, due to lack of resources, this project is put on hold.

December, 2071: Following a disastrous Admiralty Board meeting, China withdraws both their country and resources in full, citing need to prepare for the future. Taking with them is all capability to manufacture Archimedes positron cannons, the sole human weapon capable of dealing with an Abyssal threat.

January, 2071: With further research into the exact nature of Shipgirls, it is determined that it is impossible to accurately and scientifically determine how they are representative of their respective ships or how they retains the ship's "memories." However, many scientists begin to draw parallels to the Shinto belief that spirits can come from benign, everyday objects, becoming lesser youkai – Tsukumogami. Using this myth, it is explained that the spirits of the warships come to inhabit the bodies of women. Many other scientists express scorn for this concept, citing it as unscientific. However, what _is_ determined is that Shipgirls have a distinct signature, detectable in a specialized brain scan called the Wellsman Test, named after the late Theodore Wellsman and creator of the Fleet Girls project. What used to be a process of trial and error becomes a quick, five minute test to see if one has a matching signature, and civilians are urged to take it. This signature is called the SG Signature.

February, 2071: The Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST) begins reverse engineering the Archimedes Positron Cannon.

May, 2071: Construction of the _Dawn_ is completed nearly two months behind schedule, reasons being technical issues with its hydrogen reactor, and initiates a five-hour engine burn to rendezvous with the _Rorqual,_ held in geostatic orbit above Japan. The mission is expected to last at least six months to determine the state of the _Rorqual._

June, 2071: The _Dawn_ makes its rendezvous with the _Rorqual_ midorbit.

July, 2071: In Munich, Germany, a previously unknown Shipgirl is found. While she gave off a similar reading to two other Shipgirls, namely Bismarck and Tirpitz, this should normally be impossible as only two Bismarck-class battleships were built during the war. The Shipgirl is taken into protective custody while this phenomenon is investigated.

August, 2071: Reverse engineering of the Archimedes cannon is completed.

September, 2071: A city-wide riot breaks out in Madrid following an announcement of a major food shortage. Police are forced to use tear gas and water cannons. Aid is sent in by France.

September, 2071: The mission to determine the _Rorqual's_ status completes a full month ahead of schedule – they find that all it lacks are crew members.

September, 2071: With the mission members acting as the crew, the _Rorqual_ is started and given the task to mine resources out of the asteroid belt around Sol.

September, 2071: The _Rorqual's_ engines perform far better than predicted, and passes by Mars within two weeks. While performing a fly-by, dozens of drones are released to map out the surface of Mars and determine where the most valuable resources are, and if it can be made habitable.

October, 2071: Sightings of Abyssals are reported off the Coast of Maui.

October, 2071: The _Rorqual_ reaches the solar asteroid belt and begins mining operations using hundreds of automated drones.

December, 2071: On the one year anniversary of the Abyssals being driven back, the Admiralty Board releases a full disclosure on the Fleet Girl project. Though public backlash is fierce, the knowledge is accepted and, in some cases, celebrated.

December, 2071: The _Rorqual_ finishes its mining operations and begins its journey home, carrying over one hundred million tons of raw ore.

January, 2072: The _Rorqual_ returns to Earth and releases its cargo into the ocean. It stabilizes the resource situation and allows surviving countries to focus on rebuilding.

April, 2072: The Archimedes II positron cannon comes out of development, boasting greater range and firepower at reduced size and power consumption. More still, it is being further developed for Fleet Girl armaments.

June, 2072: Advanced agricultural technology transforms Africa into a paradise for growing crops. It is expected to feed nearly three quarters of the remaining human population.

July, 2072: The _Rorqual_ 's crew is rotated out and ventures out for another mining operation.

November, 2072: A light Abyssal force attacks Maui. It is utterly decimated by the local Shipgirl fleet.

December, 2072: During a Wellsman Test in Hokkaido, Japan, two sisters are found to have an SG Signature. Further investigation and activation determine that they possess the twice destroyed souls of torpedo cruisers Kitakami and Ooi. Further questioning finds that they have the ship's original memories, as well as that of their time as Shipgirls. They are welcomed into the Yokosuka Fleet.

January, 2073: Following Kitakami and Ooi's resurrection, it is leaked to the public that Shipgirls have come back to life from an unknown source. Activists protest that the Fleet Girl project is unethical, and that the process to activate them destroys the person. Supports counter that they retain all memories, both from the previous lives and their current ones. Kitakami and Ooi support this claim.

February, 2073: The Syracuse LW (Lightweight) cannon is developed for Fleet Girl armaments.

May, 2073: Another Wellsman Test determines that a second generation American immigrant has an SG Signature. Unlike previous cases where nationality determines which country of origin the respective warship hails from – in this case, North America – she has a similar signature to that Yokosuka flagship Yamato. She is taken in to protective custody for further investigation.

November, 2073: Shipgirls Melina and Jane are determined to have signatures that were never part of the conflict in WWII. In the case of Melina, she is the planned sister ship to Bismark and Tirpitz, and lacking a formal name is christened Melina. For Jane, it is found that she has the soul of one of the two Yamato-class battleships that were never finished. She is christened Shepard. They are taken into the Yokosuka Shipyard to have their ship souls activated, and fitted for armaments. Shepard opts to delay her fitting until Yokosuka flagship Yamato awakens.

November, 2073: Further investigation reveals that Melina is the planned, but never constructed H-44 design, a Bismark-class derivative giving her 50 centimeter cannons as opposed to 38 centimeters, making her the most heavily armed Shipgirl that the world's navies possess. She is rushed through training and immediately placed as Germany's flagship.

August, 2075: China declares a state of emergency due to lack of resources. Attempts to reach out to the country fail.

September, 2075: A large Abyssal fleet attacks Maui. The Maui Shipgirl fleet is forced to retreat, but returns with reinforcments from Yokosuka. The Abyssal fleet is destroyed.

April, 2076: After five long years, the Yokosuka flagship Yamato comes out of repairs. She is the first Shipgirl to undergo modernization – her turrets are upgraded to Syracuse LW cannons, enabling her to fire particle beams and shells, and she is given an extensive remodel; her armor is upgraded with modern materials, and her anti-air and secondary weapons suites are replaced with Syracuse SLW (Super Lightweight) particle weapons. This is in addition to upgrading her radar suite and replacing her boilers with hydrogen reactors. Using her as a model, overhaul of the rest of the Shipgirls commences. Additionally, Shepard is built from the ground up with modernization in mind, making her construction the fastest in Yokosuka's recent memory.

May, 2076: The Armstrong Mission commences, to create a settlement on Luna and spark interest for extraterrestrial settlements.

June, 2076: All existing Archimedes particle cannons emplacements are upgraded to Achimedes II.

September, 2077: Liara T'Soni is born.

July, 2080: Armstrong Outpost at Shackleton Crater becomes the first settlement on Luna. The following Eos Chasma mission aims to put a city on Mars.

January, 2088: The _Rorqual_ is upgraded with construction drones, making the four kilometer vessel the first mobile shipyard. Her first task is to create another _Rorqual_ -class mining ship.

February, 2090: Admiral Nikolai Lobachevski, the first Russian Admiral, passes in his sleep due to age. Anton Guruluvich, his second in command, succeeds him.

March, 2091: The second _Rorqual_ -class mining ship is finished, and is christened the _Resplendent._ Both ships relocate to Mars and aid in the construction effort.

November, 2091: After nearly two decades of media blackout, China is revealed to have consumed itself in riots and mass genocide. After the most recent tally, the world's population stands at two billion, seven hundred and eighteen million, eight hundred and twenty-eight thousand, two hundred and seventy-eight people.

January, 2100: Overhaul of the Shipgirl fleets is completed.

March, 2103: The European Space Agency's Lowell City in Eos Chasma becomes the first permanent human settlement on Mars.

August, 2110: Admiral Isei Ouma, commander of Yokosuka Naval Base, dies in the hospital due to cancer. He is surrounded by his Shipgirls on his passing.

August, 2110: Anti-Fleet Girl activists, derivatives of the original Fleet Girl protesters having been in the background for decades trying to undermine the Fleet Girl project, begin a slander campaign, citing that the Shipgirls will be as useless as their WWII counterparts now that their Admiral is dead. Name-ship Nagato is reported to have responded, "You can bomb us. You can torpedo us. You can humiliate us, scuttle us, use us for _target practice._ But one thing that the Yokosuka Fleet will not stand for- no, what _any_ fleet will not stand for, is for ignorant, degenerate _scum_ to openly berate and insult our Admiral. Attack his honor again – the honor of a dead man – and know this; our retribution will be swift, painful, and complete. _Do not test us."_

August, 2110: Anti-Fleet Girl activists assault Yokosuka, aiming to sabotage the repair docks, and kill multiple guards and staff members during their infiltration. They are undetected and carry out their mission, but to much less damage than anticipated. They destroy a singular repair bath and damage the general-use bath, while in use by Shipgirls Kongo, Akagi, Yamato, Fubuki, and Nagato. One saboteur is killed, while the five others are severely injured and apprehended. Burn patterns and bone fragments pulled from the walls suggest that the damage was caused by a 41 centimeter explosive shell. Nagato denies comment.

September, 2110: The Anti-Fleet Girl movement is summarily liquidated and disbanded.

November, 2112: A study into the physiology of Shipgirls reveals that they have the most resilient immune systems ever recorded, theoretically able to survive a room full of nerve gas with no undue effects. Additionally, they do not age, or if they do age it is extremely slowly.

June, 2122: With a total of four _Rorqual_ -class mining/construction ships available, duties are split among the ships. The _Rorqual_ will continue mining and bringing ore back to Earth, while the _Resplendent_ will focus on ship and station construction within the asteroid belt of Sol. Meanwhile, the _Tweedledee_ and _Tweedledum,_ the newly constructed _Rorqual-_ class ships, will focus on construction outside the asteroid belt, and allow further expansion.

September, 2134: Steven Hackett is born.

October, 2137: David Anderson is born.

October, 2137: The Eldfell-Ashland Energy Corporation demonstrates helium-3 fuel extraction on Saturn. It is quickly disregarded, citing that hydrogen reactors are much more efficient. However, tests are run to determine if it can be weaponized.

November, 2138: It is determined that helium-3 is fifty times more explosive than an H-bomb. JAIST is commissioned to create missiles and torpedoes using it.

January, 2139: Saren Arterius is born.

January, 2139: Kahlee Sanders is born.

August, 2140: A massive Abyssal fleet is detected on both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. With the new Archimedes II and weapon upgrades of the Shipgirls, they are able to stop their advance, but not before coming within fifty and thirty miles of Madrid and Yokosuka, respectively. Scientists speculate that within twenty years, a final assault from the Abyssals will be large enough to wipe out their defenses. Plans are drawn to evacuate the planet, and efforts to construct stations and terraform Mars redouble.

December, 2143: Construction of Gagarin Station begins beyond the orbit of Pluto.

June, 2144: The Lancer line of missiles and torpedoes are launched, using a small core of solidified helium-3. However, they are extremely unstable – it is found that they can only be used in a vacuum for safety.

February, 2146: Thane Krios is born.

March, 2147: Trace amounts of an unknown element are discovered on Mars.

April, 2148: Following the trace element discovers a small cache of highly advanced technology hidden deep beneath the surface of Mars on the south polar region of Promethei Planum. With it, the science of mass effect fields are quickly explored, leading to the development of faster than light travel and beginning detailed exploration of the Sol system. However, it is deemed unsuitable for large vessels, such as the _Rorqual_ , and efforts to find a suitable alternative are launched. No name is brought up to call the race – however, scientists are concerned over the fact that the cache is ancient, suggesting that whatever race made the outpost, they were watching Earth.

June, 2149: Following information from the translated data cache found on Mars, it is discovered that Charon, Pluto's moon, is actually a piece of dormant technology encased in ice.

PRESENT DAY: JULY 4TH, 2149


	3. Gagarin

JULY 4TH, 2149

1135 hours Earth Standard Time

LAGRANGE-CLASS ORBITAL RESEARCH PLATFORM

 _GAGARIN STATION_

PLUTO

" _Attention all hands, this is XO Nathaniel Pressly. We have stabilized the station's orbit and we are coming within range of Charon. Operation Looking Glass will commence by 2200 hours, report to emergency stations at by this time. That is all."_

She ran a hand through her burning red hair, letting out a shaky, nervous breath as the intercom clicked off. This would be her first assignment without her sisters with her, a fact that terrified her to her core. Dim memories of loneliness and desolation had plagued her dreams during the three day transit to Pluto, which was alarming in itself as the voyage was usually upwards of a month. She didn't show her true feelings, however – she hid behind a stern mask that she'd long since honed to perfection, something which had been useful many times since her fitting back in 2073.

She chuckled. Her life had taken a very strange turn back then, but it was one she didn't regret. Taking a calming breath, she shut her locker and turned to face the sole mirror in her small, windowless stateroom.

Her name was Shepard. She didn't go by her first name anymore, as it was simply easier to be known by her ship name, though whether or it was for convenience's sake she'd been christened with her own last name after her fitting. As the youngest of her sister ships, she hadn't had a chance to take on real combat aside from the odd patrol and endless training – she wasn't even supposed to be on this mission, but more and more frequent Abyssal attacks had called the most experienced Shipgirls into action. So, while her sisters and friends were fighting for their lives, she was seven and a half billion kilometers away and stuck in a half-built tin can that she didn't trust not to spontaneously decompress. It happened just last week, and it was absolutely terrifying.

Shepard shook herself out of her thoughts, taking a moment to make her uniform was in place before she spun on her heel and walked to the door, keying in the command on the glowing control panel beside it to open.

And with a hiss of pneumatics it did, only for Shepard to stop in her tracks at the sight of someone already there. She eyed the woman before her in distaste, clad in the skintight minidress abomination that the Germans had the audacity to call a uniform for their Shipgirls. She appeared to be in her early twenties, though with the slowed lifespan of Shipgirls like them, it was hard to hard to believe that the German was in her eighties. The same could be said of Shepard – she herself was twenty when she was fitted, and barely looked a day older.

"Melina," she greeted coolly, though she idly wondered just how long the German girl had been waiting.

"Shepard." The girl eyed her just as much dislike as Shepard did, scoffing at Shepard's own uniform. Taking advantage of Yokosuka's less stringent regulations, Shepard had modified the formfitting blouse that Yamato favored by cutting off the shoulder-exposing sleeves and replacing them with black forearm guards, as well as wearing black leggings under the red skirt that the higher-ups had seen fit to make mandatory attire.

Shepard hoped that whoever made that particular rule was long dead and gone, or else she'd broadside them herself.

With a curt nod, she stepped out into the windowless corridor, unbothered by the exposed piping lining the walls or the metal grating that rattled under her feet. In short, nearly everything wasn't fully built yet. Gagarin Station had only begun construction six years before, and it was large enough that, even with the _Resplendent_ working full time, they'd only finished around half of the station's was classified as an extraterrestrial housing experiment to see the effects on the mind during a long-term confinement – it was written more insidious than it actually was. Once finished, the six kilometer wide station would be home to over sixty thousand as researchers performed deep space scans and sent probes out to find just what exactly was out there. Of course, that was the plan back in 2143 – after finding the alien cache, the station's already formidable sensors turned their attention on Pluto's largest moon. After over a year of deep core scanning, they had determined that _something_ was there… they just didn't know what.

"I've been instructed to inform you that you must report to Outfitting by 1300 hours for maintenance," Melina said… though with her tone of voice, it seemed more of a demand.

"Very well," Shepard said curtly. Truthfully she hadn't forgotten, but she understood the higher-up's need to remind some of the younger Shipgirls of the fleet.

Melina caught up to Shepard as the pair walked down the corridor, dodging a sprinting technician with a quick twist of her body. As the man's footsteps thundering footsteps faded, Shepard gave the German a sidelong glance.

"So how did you end up assigned here, anyway? I thought the European Coalition needed their Wunder-Mädchen on hand at all times," Shepard quipped.

With a cocky smirk, Melina stepped ahead and spun on her heel, walking backwards as she grinned and taunted, "Aw, is the third Yamato jealous?"

Shepard snorted, eagerly awaiting when the girl would trip. "No, just wondering how massive your fuck-up was to get you sent out here."

The German girl merely laughed at this.

"If you _must_ know," Melina said haughtily, "the fleet wanted their flagship to be present when history was made. I guess the same couldn't be said of Yokosuka – they didn't even bother sending their flagship, they sent the _spare."_

Shepard's breath caught at that. Memories of laying forgotten, helpless in an abandoned shipyard flashed through her mind, before finally being ripped apart for scrap. She put a good effort in restraining herself – however, like her sisters Yamato and Musashi, she held the power of a seventy-two thousand ton battleship in her body and power like that was always just under the surface, waiting to be used. Face twisted with rage, Shepard threw an admirable right hook into Melina's face that compressed the very air, sending a thunderclap of sound booming down the corridors and causing a deep thud to reverberate throughout the ship.

Shepard was equally infuriated and relieved to see that Melina had caught her fist before it connected, hiding her own exertion behind a cocky grin. "So, Miss Stoic _can_ get angry. I thought you were just a statue," she snarked, throwing Shepard's fist aside.

What the _hell_ was she thinking? Shepard shook her head, clearing her mind of the red fury before she turned tail and marched away as fast as she could from Melina, her mind in turmoil.

Melina grinned at her retreat. "Oh, what's wrong? Being a spare isn't so bad!"

Shepard wasn't retreating, quite the contrary. No, she was distancing herself from the German so she wouldn't do anything stupid… well, anything _more_ stupid than trying to slug the Shipgirl in the face. The first reason was simple - she desperately wanted to keep herself out of trouble with the higher-ups, not wanting to give them more ammunition for sidelining her than they already did. And the second... well, it was that Melina far outclassed anything the fleet had to offer.

It was quite simple. The Yamato-class battleships weighed in at seventy-two thousand tons, with a length of two hundred sixty-three meters. Yamato and her sistership Musashi were heralded as the largest, most advanced battleships ever fielded in history. On the other hand, the H-44 design was never constructed, yet the simple conception had been enough to bring the Shipgirl into existence.

The H-44 would have weighed in at one hundred thirty-one thousand tons, with a length of three hundred forty-five meters and utterly dwarfing the Yamato class. Not only that, but the penetrative power of cannon shells exponentially increased to how wide the barrel was - while it might not seemed like much, the four inch difference between the 46 centimeter guns of the Yamato class and the 50 centimeter guns of the H-44 class meant that Melina's cannons had nearly double* the sheer power of Shepard's. If Melina ever got serious, she could decimate anything the Fleet had to offer.

And Shepard wasn't stupid enough to continue antagonizing the Shipgirl, though constantly being singled out by the German was a true test in patience. She was lucky that

Shepard made her way through _Gagarin's_ corridors, letting her anger fade with every step she took. On a whim, she entered an elevator that had happened to be disgorging its passengers and let her mind drift back to her sisters and how they were doing, taking the elevator to the viewing area, a massive dome at the top of the station made of a completely transparent alloy that the techs back on Earth had cooked up. Shepard didn't know much about it herself, but apparently a new element had been found on Mars that was becoming its major export – some kind of chalky ore that had been dubbed lommite, due to its loam-like texture. When smelted with steel, the ore turned the material anywhere from opaque to completely clear.

Not surprisingly, they'd called the new metal transparisteel, but they were experimenting with different metals all the time. Next on the list was titanium, apparently.

Whatever the case, there was certainly a fantastic view offered.

Shepard chuckled to herself as she stepped out of the elevator. "How do I always end up here when I'm not paying attention?"

Naturally, due to the fact that the station was still under construction, there wasn't nearly as many people as there should have been in the viewing area. It was arranged like a massive shopping mall, with a concession area in the center on a raised dais and cubicles for stores lining the circular room. Of course it didn't offer much at the moment – it was still fully under construction, with only the dais truly finished. From where the elevator stopped on the dais, Shepard could see crews busily welding metal sheets and bulkheads in place, creating a loud buzzing sound that was strangely calming to her. With construction going around the clock, Gagarin was well on its way to being completed by the end of next year.

She leaned against the railing, staring up at the view that Pluto offered. The sight of the pale blue planet, glimmering in the light of the distant Sol never got old to her.

"Enjoying yourself?"

Shepard blinked, and a crooked grin lit her face as she turned and said, "I was, and then you showed up. Good morning, Misato."

It wasn't the real Misato Okita. The woman had died nearly forty years before, just after her husband, Admiral Ouma, had passed on. Then some scientist named Kalsey back on Earth got the bright idea that, since AI's were extremely difficult to create with pure coding, she'd create one based on the brain scans of a dead person, using a map of their own synapses to copy the original over.

The lucky person just happened to be Misato Okita, who was too dead to protest even if she wanted to. Still, from what Shepard remember of the insane woman, she would have been thoroughly pleased with what could only be described as her twin. Though she was a mere hologram, "Misato" had taken her appearance from what was the original's prime, taking on the form of a woman in her late twenties with thick black hair and blatantly showing herself off with boots, black dress, and an unzipped red bomber jacket.

Despite the AI's quirks, however, she was the most powerful quantum computer ever devised, always learning, always watching, and always ready to put her petabytes of computing power to work.

Misato took on an entirely fake innocent look. "I have no idea what you mean," she said, "leaning" on the railing as well.

Shepard snorted, eyeing the hologram. "Oh, please. I _know_ you're the one who switched my Type 86 shells for duds during practice yesterday."

At that Misato snorted, a strangely organic sound. "Y-you gotta admit, that was pretty good," she managed to say, struggling to contain her laughter.

Shepard shook her head. "How you managed to get confetti into a practice dummy is beyond me…"

"POOF!" Misato crowed, before she was smitten by laughs that echoed throughout the station.

"And you're supposed to be an all-powerful AI…" Shepard shook her head. "So, we're supposed to get a transport out here, right? To investigate Charon?"

Misato wiped away a few nonexistent tears as she calmed down. "Yes, the UNIC Merlin.** Warlock-class destroyer and the first space vessel built for combat. Designed by yours truly, of course," Misato added, almost too proud of herself.

Surprised, Shepard turned to the hologram. "You designed it?" she asked incredulously.

" _And_ requisitioned the Rorqual to build it. I couldn't trust you lowly humans to not muck up my baby," Misato said.

Shepard frowned. "'Lowly humans?'"

"Eh, it sounded funny."

"It sounded like an evil overlord in the making."

"I wouldn't be an overlord! Just evil."

"Crazy AI," Shepard muttered, shaking her head.

Misato's brow twitched. "Your sister ships have bigger _cannons_ than you."

"…That's not anything to do with being a Shipgirl, that's just crazy genetics."

"Just keep telling yourself that."

The two stood in companionable silence for a time, watching Pluto drifting above their heads.

"So," Shepard began, "it's finally happening."

Misato nodded, her hologram humming softly. "Yep. I've predicted three possible outcomes… well, the three that aren't in the lower decimals."

"Yeah?"

At Shepard curious expression, Misato held up three fingers. "One: the archives were lying and Charon is a lifeless hunk of rock. We all go on our merry way. This is most likely. Two: something _is_ in Charon and we're all faced with the reality that we aren't alone in the universe. This has a fifty-fifty shot of either bringing us to a golden age or making us kill ourselves with mass riots and panic."

Shepard grimaced, both at the possibilities and how utterly logical Misato was stating them. And she _really_ didn't want to go the way of China. "And the third?" she asked.

"We get smart."

Frowning and confused, Shepard looked to Misato, who herself was staring at Pluto. "Uh… care to explain for the uninformed?"

"A golden age would be beneficial, yes, but they're also known for rapid mass expansion and consumerism," Misato explained. "Tell me something. If there _is_ something in Charon, what does that say?"

Shepard stayed silent for exactly half a second before she said, "That something or someone had to put it there."

Misato grinned. "Exactly. More than that, we're finding more and more evidence that shows that whoever built that archive was imperialistic, and empires don't tend to be too happy when someone mucks with their stuff. So, while we're getting all fat and happy on new territories, what do we do if we find whoever put whatever's in Charon?"

Truthfully, Shepard didn't have the faintest clue. She wasn't her job to theorize about what if's – it was, however, her job to shoot up, blow up, and otherwise wreck whoever's shit up that decided it could tangle with humanity. Any wanton glory seeking or romantic thoughts she'd ever had had long since been beaten out of her, ever since the incident with Kaga. Shaking her head to get rid of the bad memory, she decided to just give her opinion and shrugged. "It would depend on the circumstances. First contact scenarios have never gone over well throughout history… but usually, one side attacks the other because they were encroaching on territory."

"Exactly," Misato agreed. "While we're off pioneering and conquering new lands we might be unintentionally invading someone else's backyard, and who knows if they have superior technology. Or we have the superior technology. We just don't know. We might even run into that empire.

Misato sighed. "I've already put in an initiative with the Admiralty Board to prevent something like that – Slow Expansionism, I called it. We explore a system, secure it, then build ourselves up before we continue on. Unfortunately, option three only has a five percent chance of occurring."

"You're talking like you already know what's in there," Shepard said, suspicious as she waved her hand towards Pluto and Charon on the other side of it.

Much to her consternation, Misato shrugged. "I have my suspicions. Call it intuition."

Shepard stared at her AI friend, then chuckled as she sat on the railing. "Well, whichever way it goes, I'm sure we won't get any peace and quiet around here anymore."

" _Pssh!_ Who needs that?" Misato snorted, her serious tone lost. "There's only two things I need, and that's booze and guns with lots of ammo!"

"It sounds like church in the South," Shepard deadpanned.

Misato leveled the same blasé expression back at her. "That's profiling. You should be above that."

"Why, because I'm a Shipgirl? That's profiling, too."

With a snigger, the AI gave Shepard a snide grin as she leaned in close. "You know what's funny, though?"

Shepard suppressed the urge to groan, knowing that the AI was about to make some inane that only she would find funny. Still, she resigned herself and asked, "What is?"

"It's 1305. You're late for your appointment."

Before Shepard could even register Misato's non sequitur, the intercom gave a loud blare and the sound of a man's nasal, high-pitched voice came on.

" _Is this on? Yes, no? Yes? Good. Eh-hem… YAMATO-CLASS SHEPARD! REPORT TO OUTFITTING IMMEDIATELY!"_

Pause.

" _That is all."_

Shepard stood there, her face frozen in shock and mouth gaping as the man's scream finished echoing throughout the station. Naturally, Misato's hologram had disappeared, much to her ire. There was only one word that came to Shepard's mind to describe the AI.

"Bitch."

* * *

 _Allo, allo!_ _So, first up, I'd like to apologize for taking so long. I'm in the middle of a move right now, so I have next to zilch free time. And then I went through three different revisions... ugh. Not fun. Especially when you have an idea and just can't quite seem to get it right. Still, a month is WAY too long between chapters. So, I apologize for that._

 _Anyway! We have a direction, people! Still, its malleable at this point, so I'd like for you guys to put in suggestions: Who should humanity encounter first? I've put a poll up on my profile, check it out. I have my own ideas, but still, I'd like to hear your suggestions._

 _Also, I'd like to thank Death Knight 1993 for his excellent suggestions on where to look for ships. Trolling on Deviantart also helps. Also special thanks to alienvx0 for catching my mixup that Kitakami and Ooi were destroyers. They weren't destroyers - they were light cruisers with a veritable shit ton of torpedo launchers. Those things are absolutely ridiculous on World of Warships._

 _That's enough of this AN as I want to work on the next chapter. I know not much happens, but I'm trying to introduce things at a decent pace. Still, thank you for your interest and support. It helps._

 _Later_

 _-RYNO_

 _*: I'm just spitballing here - I know the bore increases the power behind the shell, just not by how much._

 _**: The first design that I thought would be a good first for humanity's first foray into a space navy. Go to 2753Productions on Deviantart to see his design, its pretty cool. I figure that its around 200-250 meters long, just a bit longer than the Normandy SR2, but with a lot more bulk to it._


	4. Extrapolation

_No excuses, just an explanation: my dad had knee surgery, and I've been help take care of him._

 _Simple as that._

 _Anyway, I hope you guys enjoy, and I apologize for the long wait._

 _Cheers_

 _PS: As you'll be able to tell, I'm leaning towards a heavy smattering of Halo-verse being through this fic, so I guess you could call it a tri-crossover between Mass Effect, KanColle, and Halo, thanks to receiving help on another fic I've got and realizing that UNSC aren't nearly as outlandish as some fics make them out to be. With this in mind, what would you guys like to see throughout this story?_

* * *

It watched.

Deep beneath layers on layers of ice and rock, it stirred. It felt waves playing on its surface, waves that searched it out from its tomb. It would have awakened… but the rays were indiscernible, mindless chatter that sang out of key. So, it waited. It was looked upon again, and again, and again… all with the same off-key chatter.

Following the decree left by its creators, it waited, letting them build themselves slowly, properly, and as expected of them.

It watched… and waited.

-O-O-O-

"Out of the way! Move it, people!"

With a bellow that echoed down the corridor, Shepard sprinted as fast as she dared without crushing the floor beneath her feet. Each step made everything within twenty meters tremble at her passing. It was fortunate that weren't many people at the station – as it was, there were still a few workers and technicians that had to flatten themselves against the wall to escape being trampled.

 _Damn it!_

Shepard pushed herself as hard as she could, yet it seemed that she just couldn't make enough headway through the station's twisting passages to matter. Outfitting was almost directly at the bottom of the station, with the only way to get to there at the moment was a service tram that connected the two neatly bisected halves of the station, the lower half significantly less completed than the top. Whereas the upper half had its basic shape and even sported armor, albeit in patches that left swaths of its innards exposed, the lower half was a mess of girders and spacewalk tethers between individual sections that had been cobbled together. In truth there wasn't supposed to be a lower half, but the design plans had changed soon after construction began to accommodate more people. With the Resplendent already tasked with the main part of the station, the Rorqual used its drones to mine into the moon and build enough of the lower half that it could be towed to Pluto, from way back on Earth.

Nearly colliding with a maintenance robot pulled Shepard from her wandering thoughts. And it was just as well, as she nearly missed her turn.

Shepard tried to stop, only for her boots to kick up sparks as she skidded into the intersection – Junction A, almost directly in the center of the station, and where she would need to get aboard the service tram. She would have gone sailing down the wrong corridor if she hadn't reached out and grabbed an exposed steel rib as she slid by, sending her careening around the corner. She flailed as she struggled to regain her balance, refusing to cry out in panic. Luckily the corridor was short, ending with a pair of sliding doors that groaned open even as she stumbled toward them.

An unlucky technician yelped as she tumbled through the doors, quickly running out of the tram while Shepard was left to slam headfirst into the tram wall.

-O-O-O-

Somewhere on the station, a certain German Shipgirl was about to settle in front of her holoscreen, mug of coffee in hand, wrapped in a blanket, and wanting nothing more than to hook up online and play a few – dozen – matches of her favorite game. After all, it would be several hours until she would have to make an appearance. She might as well enjoy it.

Just as she brought the coffee to her lips a tremor ran through the station, startling the young woman… and thus, losing her grip on her mug, sending coffee flying everywhere.

" _SCHIESSE!"_ she screamed, watching in horror as her brand new computer fizzled and died.

-O-O-O-

"Shit," Shepard grumbled, rubbing her nose as she picked herself off the floor.

" _Ah, sorry about that. Unfortunately the techies haven't installed any inertial dampeners in the elevators yet… which isn't very smart, now that I think about it,"_ the disembodied voice of Misato said, tinny as it echoed through the tram's intercom. _"What'll you poor, defenseless humans do when the tram starts banging around? All that'd be left would be mush. Ew."_

"Yeah yeah, mock the meatbags…" Shepard grumbled, eyeing the vaguely face-shaped dent in the lower wall.

With a dull clunk the tram began to move. Though there were windows in the walls, they were covered by metal shielding that sent a nervous shiver down Shepard's spine. She hated the metal coffin. She'd been able to keep herself from getting on the thing for the two weeks she'd been aboard Gagarin, sticking to the stairs and service elevators whenever she could, but it seemed her luck had finally run out. Though she knew the tram was safe – hell, it ran dozens of times a day – she still couldn't shake the thought that the tram would snap off its guides and go drifting off into the black of space, never to be seen again.

Shepard shivered, and latched onto the wall railings. It was probably just the unknown of it all, but even the five seconds she'd spent in the tram were enough to make her panic rise and her breath catch.

"Hey Misato," she said tersely, "can you –"

The AI was already thinking ahead, having planned an appropriate response five trillion cycles before. Still, just to be safe, Misato sectioned off portions of her processing power to monitor essential station functions – life support, oxygen production, core scanning, gravitic generators – even as she sent off ghost copies of herself to handle menial tasks and resource requests for the general public.

It was all to let her focus on her favorite Shipgirl, watching Shepard through the tram's single video camera.

A single glance at the young – in relative terms – woman's nervous posture and elevated heart rate warned Misato that she was about to suffer from anxiety, and knowing her nervousness about the tram, hypothesized that the only thing that would be guaranteed to eliminate the problem would be to allow the afflicted to see was was happening

She opened the windows.

" _Way ahead of you, Shepard,"_ Misato said, as the metal shutters rolled out of the way.

All was still, the tram rolling out through a metal tunnel on a track and out into the emptiness that bisected the two halves of the station. In that moment it seemed that nothing else existed, save for Shepard and the jewel that Pluto had become, with the sun was just barely peeking over the dwarf planet's horizon. The light made the icy surface glimmer and shine, giving Shepard pause as she stared at the planet in awe. The only thing that kept her grounded in reality was the soft shaking of the tram as it rolled along its track, crossing the two kilometers between the two halves of the station.

Misato was pleased to note that Shepard's heartrate was slowing as she calmed from her rising panic.

Shepard let out a sigh, pressing her hand against the transparisteel partition. "Amazing," she muttered, etching the moment into her mind.

" _Have you ever been on a moonwalk before, Shepard?"_

"Hell no," Shepard scoffed half-heartedly. "I'm a Shipgirl. I'm meant to be on water, not floating around in a vacuum. But…"

She could imagine the expectant gaze that Misato had. _"But…?"_

With a sigh, Shepard pulled away from the partition and turned, resting against the railing. "But it has a certain appeal. I'm not saying that I'll ever get used to space travel, but I think I can come to at least enjoy it."

" _That's good, 'cause we might not get back to Earth for a long, long_ _time._ "

Shepard scowled. "Don't remind me. We only have eleven years left."

With that dark thought in mind, Misato dedicated a few more of her runtimes to her pet project.

There was a long period of silence as Shepard stared out the windows before Misato gathered up her nerves. _"So Shepard, can I ask what happened with Melina?"_

Shepard chuckled, having been somewhat expectant for Misato to ask about that, though she was surprised at the sudden segue. "Well, you cut right to it, don't you?" she muttered.

" _Just curious. I also have to log the event in the monthly incident report, and I'd like to have my facts straight so I can defend you before the Admiralty Board."_

Shepard grumbled under her breath. "Is this really necessary?" she asked testily.

" _It is unless you want to be court-martialed for assaulting a fellow Shipgirl."_

The warning reignited the fury Shepard felt, and she gritted out through clenched teeth, _"Court-martialed?_ That's not –"

She stopped, taking a breath to try to calm herself. It was nearly impossible however, and she glared at the camera in the corner of the ceiling. "You want to know why I took a swing at Melina? It's because I'm _disappointed._ She's the European Fleet's most powerful ship and she- she _squanders_ it thinking she's invincible. She's a spitballed design, she was never even built, but she flaunts her kills like trophies."

Misato, even as she was logging Shepard's responses, grew curious, so she decided to prod. _"And what's the issue if she gets the job done?"_

"Because she's out there slinging lead!" Shepard shouted. "I've seen her battle recordings, and all of her kills – in _every single_ battle – she was engaged at extreme range and pelted the enemy until she got a lucky hit in. More than that, she's a glorified prototype – her Outfit is just as likely to blow up as it is to fire. She has no idea what combat is, and it's going to get her or someone else _killed."_

" _So you taking a swing at her…"_

Shepard grimaced. "Was me losing my temper with her," she admitted lamely. "I met her before we were activated and she was the exact same way back then – petty and pig-headed. We… got into a routine and we competed over everything. I guess I thought that she wouldn't have changed much since then, or at least toned it down a little, but now she's gotten worse and cocky to boot. I guess I shouldn't really be surprised."

The tram shook slightly as it passed over a roughly welded section of track. Misato logged it for maintenance.

" _So… an internal dispute between crew members?"_

She shrugged. "I guess you could say that."

" _Good. Then I can write this off completely since nothing was damaged."_

Shepard felt an eyebrow raise. "Didn't you just say that you needed to report this to the Admiralty?"

The AI's shrug was felt, rather than seen. _"Since I know the reason behind it and it doesn't seem_ too _serious, I can sweep it under a mountain of minor issues I have logged. No one reads that crap anyway. Just sort it out with Melina sooner or later, m'kay? I'd rather not have to explain a hull rupture."_

Shepard gave a dark chuckle. "Misato, if me and Melina went at it there'd be nothing left of the station. She could absolutely wreck everything if she wanted to, but she's still only one ship. Her against me, you, and about two thousand security guards armed with positron weaponry? It'd be a one-sided war that would end _very_ quickly. She would have been the largest ship ever constructed if she had been built, but even if she had, just look at what happened during Ten-Go; the _Yamato,_ the most advanced ship of the twentieth century, was sunk through sheer number of airplanes, not even warships. One on one would be suicide, but throw enough bullets and some of them will stick."

She gave a sardonic chuckle. "But that would never happen. She's not that stupid. But she's arrogant, and it's going to get someone killed someday."

" _So… her calling you a 'spare?'"_

Shepard had been able to maintain a certain level of calm throughout her entire conversation with her AI friend. However, just hearing 'spare' sent those damned visions through her mind again. Biting down a sharp retort, Shepard let out a long, calming breath before she responded, "That part is a little touchy for me."

" _A little?"_ Misato teasingly asked.

"Okay, _a lot_ ," Shepard conceded. "I was designated Warship Number 111 back then, Misato. I rusted in a shipyard for two years, and then I was ripped apart for scrap. I know these aren't my memories, I know that it wasn't actually _me_ , but… I still feel their grinders ripping my body apart." As she spoke, Shepard subconsciously hugged herself, gripping her elbows with a strength that would snap the bones of a normal human.

Misato, for all her processing ability, could not think of a response.

The tram gave another shudder, snapping the pair from their thoughts. Shepard looked out the window to see that the tram had almost made its way to the second half of the station, now little more than a hundred meters away from the tunnel where the rail connected. Now that she was closer she could see the skeletal inner workings of the station, a cross-section of rooms, corridors, and empty bays that would support life on the station. The tram trundled closer and closer, until finally it was swallowed up by the darkened tunnel. Lights flickered on and revealed a uniform corridor of welded durasteel.

Misato gave a digital shake of her head, and decided to change the subject. _"Okay, I should let you know that its 1315. It's not so bad, you're only fifteen minutes late!"_

"Thanks, I was _dying_ to know that," Shepard blandly said to the ceiling, snapping herself from her thoughts.

" _Ooh, touchy!"_ Misato sang. _"Toodles!"_

The intercom clicked off, Misato making her retreat back to the digital highways of Gagarin Station, and leaving Shepard to stew in her frustration.

" _Now arriving at: Junction E. Thank for using the Gagarin Local Transport System,_ " the intercom droned, much more robotic sounding than Misato. The tram began to slow, and finally stopped in front of a heavy steel door that ground open with a shower of sparks. Shepard watched with a hand on her hip as the tram trundled into the airlock and came to a stop at a raised platform, a simple grating that stepped down to a second door that had several people waiting on the other side, visible through the transparisteel partition.

" _Pressurization in progress. Do not open door while pressurization is in progress."_

Shepard had no intention of opening that door. She wasn't keen to find out what happened when a Shipgirl was exposed to a vacuum. Still, she idly noted that whoever wrote out the station's warnings should have taken some grammar courses beforehand.

There was a chime, followed by, _"Pressurization complete. You may now disembark."_

The door slid open, and Shepard was immediately assailed by workers who rushed to get on the tram. "Wait, let me through!" she yelled, to no avail as more and more people packed themselves in. At the rate she was going, the tram would be headed back to Junction A by the time she reached the doors. Being the physical embodiment of a Yamato-class battleship, she needed to be careful not to accidentally paste some poor sole against the wall. Still, the blatant disregard they had made her frazzled temper flare up once more. Finally she'd had enough, and with a growl shouldered her way through the mob with the ease of a ship through water, paying no mind to their indignant grunts and curses. She pushed her way through against an ever-growing throng of workers, until she finally popped through the other side of the airlock like a cork out of a bottle. Shepard paid no mind to their dirty looks as she stopped to catch her breath, idly looking around at the room she was in to get her bearings.

Junction E had been set up as a reception area, a far cry from the cobbled together, temporary intersection of Junction A. It seemed that the two halves of the station had been designed by two entirely different people, and since the Gagarin Station – the upper half – was based on a design that was drawn up before the beginning of the Abyssal War, it quite literally was. The much cleaner lines and sterile atmosphere was lost on Shepard however, as she quickly stepped over to the circular desk dominating the center of the room and the nearest of four receptionists on duty.

The woman, a brunette in a flashy red dress that hugged her figure, looked up at Shepard with a smile. "May I help you?" she asked.

Shepard was unaffected by the woman's smile. "I need to get to Outfitting," she demanded.

Ignoring Shepard's brusqueness, the woman frowned. "I'm sorry, but Outfitting is for authorized personnel only. May I see your ID badge?"

At that, Shepard's mind froze. She stared at the woman, dumbfounded, mouth hanging open slightly before she mentally cursed as she realized that she left her ID back on her nightstand. "I don't have my ID on me," Shepard muttered absently. Sure, she knew she wasn't very well known to the world at large, but surely she would be recognized?

The woman took Shepard's silence as hesitance. "I'm sorry," she said with a false smile, "but I cannot let you enter a restricted area. Perhaps if you get in touch with your supervisor I can –"

"Jane Shepard, third Yamato-class Fleetgirl, ID number Y-zero-zero-one-five-two," Shepard interrupted, leveling a withering glare at the woman who only now seemed to realize her mistake, if her paling face was anything to go by. "Now that you know who I am, I need to get to Outfitting, _immediately."_

-O-O-O-

It turned out that Outfitting was a mere two minute walk from Junction E, something that irked Shepard to no end. Between her and Misato's little prank, Shepard found herself holding back her temper more than usual – her reactors burned in her breast, begging for release. Still, she'd managed to cool off somewhat by the time she reached Outfitting. The garage-exam room hybrid would have been strange to almost anyone else, but to Shepard, the strange mix of hand tools and medical utensils was where she'd begun her new life, immersed in the heady aroma of antiseptic and engine oil. Granted, it was nothing compared to the facility back in Yokosuka – it was equipped to handle all eighty of the naval base's Shipgirls at any one time – but Gagarin had enough resources and manpower to handle up to twelve. It was a respectable number, the brass back on Earth thought.

Of course, it would have been respectable if there was that many Shipgirls to spare in the first place. As far as Shepard knew, only she and Melina had been given leave on Gagarin, and while the German was more than happy to take advantage of her vacation, Shepard was positively dying to get out in the field and shoot something. It was another source of frustration for her. Heck, her entire service thus far had been a long, never ending blur of being transferred between bases, never staying longer than a few weeks as they made tweaks to herself and her armament. Hell, it had been so long since she'd gone on sortie that she forgot what water felt like..

Shepard sighed, stretching in the containment chamber that the doctor had told her to standby in. The room was plain, nothing but metal walls, floor, and ceiling, though she could see the doctor sitting in the control room twenty feet above her head, safe behind a transparisteel partition.

 _What, do they think I'm going to go on a rampage?_

Shepard sighed and shifted her feet, her weight making the floor shudder. They'd had her equip her Outfit before entering, something she wished they hadn't done - it was quite awkward to stand with her cannons on. They could have at least gotten a pool ready, or something. Then again… she had her _cannons._ Vestigial memories flowed thoughts swept through her mind; she was a _Yamato-class battleship,_ the most advanced battleship ever used in combat. Bullets bounced off her metal skin, torpedos shunted off her armor belt, bombs shrugged off. _She was invincible._

That last thought brought Shepard out of her stupor, brought back to reality with a shudder. It reminded her too much of Kaga.

Needing to get her mind off the past, she inspected her cannons. They'd changed considerably since the Mk. 1 Yamato-class armaments – the armor was much less rounded, predominantly flat surfaces and angles, and her bow jutting out in a sharp angle. The Mk. 2 armaments were all equipped with Syracuse cannons that completely removed the original barrels for the entire Shipgirl fleet, replacing them with short, stubby cannons that had naught but a single lens at the end. It was the fundamental nature of how the cannon worked – molecules were fused inside a tiny chamber in the barrel, superheating them, and when the lens opened the charged molecules caused a chain reaction along the barrel's line of fire that traveled faster than a bullet. The result was somewhat like a focused fusion reaction, and far more effective on the Abyssals. Even they couldn't protect themselves from their own bodies becoming superheated and exploding.

In short, the Syracuse LW cannon was superior in almost every way to the old slug throwers that Shepard and all the other Shipgirls had been equipped with since the war began, save that they took nearly five minutes to charge each gun with the reactors they had been equipped with.

So why the Abyss had they reinstalled the original cannons? Having both the Syracuse and her Type 94's in her turrets was like having a bastardized underbarrel attachment, and she could feel just how crammed in it was.

Huffing in irritation, she fingered her portside secondary turret, brushing off dust that had settled.

"Couldn't you people have dusted my Outfit off?" she muttered. It wasn't just annoying, it was insulting – her Outfit had formed during her rebirth, it was a part of her own body. To let it languish in some forgotten corner was downright degrading. She might not be as well-known as Fubuki, but she was still a Shipgirl.

" _What was that, Shepard?"_ one of the techies asked, his voice sounding over the intercom.

"Nevermind," she snapped.

Shepard was aware of her rudeness, but she couldn't bring herself to care – she'd been doing nothing but standing around for almost two hours while they gathered data on her. They hadn't raised this much of a fuss since Yamato's modernization. Shepard trembled, her gut twisting uncomfortably. Now _that_ had been nerve-wracking, knowing how invasive the surgery had been. They'd practically given the girl a new heart by the end of it. If it had been the actual _Yamato_ they'd been modernizing, they would have ripped open the ship's boiler room.

Spotting a technician coming over to the window, Shepard pulled herself from her thoughts.

" _Alright Shepard,"_ the man said, _"sorry to keep you waiting. We wanted to make sure that everything was good to go."_

"Good to go for what?" Shepard gritted out, hands on her hips.

" _Not for me to know, ma'am. Head on out, but keep yourself equipped until the big show. The Professor doesn't want you to be late to that."_

That immediately got Shepard's attention, and she frowned at the technician above her as she demanded, "Wait, hold on a minute! I thought I was getting a full-on checkup from how the Professor was calling me over the _station-wide intercom._ Just what was I called down here for?"

" _Not for me to know."_

What?

Shepard was tempted to say more, but was cut off by the technician languidly reaching for a control that slid metal shutters over the window, staring at a data pad all the while.

"Oh for the love of…" Shepard muttered, and let out a resigned sigh.

A hiss of hydraulics behind her signaled the testing chamber's door opening, signalling her cue to leave. Further insulted with how they expected her to simply obey, she spun on her heel to leave, grinding her boot into the floor. The movement brought on a satisfying screech of metal on metal, though Shepard was careful to keep herself from smiling when she sensed on her radar – rather than saw or heard – the scientists up in the control booth yell in pain from the feedback ripping through the intercom.

At least she got to keep her cannons for a while. It was empowering, to say the least.

-O-O-O-

Shepard passed the day with a slight smile on her face, feeling complete with her cannons attached. In truth, a Shipgirl didn't 'equip' her weapons so much as she rejoined with them, like a finger that was reattached to the body. As their Outfit formed on them during their fitting, it had to be surgically removed for them to function as a normal human, yet they reattached themselves extremely easily. Something about molecular bonding and quantum attraction, though Shepard was a little bashful to admit that she slept through that part of the lecture. All she knew was that when the mounting cradle was pressed against her back, her cannons were part of her once more. Besides, removal was necessary – walking around with cannons capable of leveling a city block tended to cause some amount of panic. The Professor had seemed to forgotten this.

Still, Shepard mused, it did work to her advantage. She didn't have to wait in line, for instance. Out respect – or possibly fear – people did their best to stay out of her way now that her weapons were in full view, which suited Shepard just fine. She was never a social butterfly. The day blissfully passed her by as she roamed the station, taking advantage of her newfound freedom while it lasted. She'd been on the station for two weeks, and she hadn't had the opportunity to simply explore.

It was remarkably easy to move around, Shepard noted. While she couldn't quite figure out what it was, she knew they had done something else to her Outfit during the two-week interim. Whatever they did, her cannons were incredibly light.

Shepard, having traveled back to the upper half of the station, was stargazing in one of Gagarin's many view platforms when she got the call.

" _Will Fleetgirls Melina and Shepard please report to the Command Center, Operation Looking Glass will commence shortly. I repeat…"_

Shepard sighed, getting to her feet with a clunk of metal and a stretch of her arms. "Show time."

-O-O-O-

PRIMER

In lieu of the fact that within ten years humanity might have to abandon Earth entirely, it was decided that humanity needed a name for itself. Humans were a species, not a name. It was a comparatively minor issue yet it carried weight in deciding humanity's future identity. In addition to this, research into cyberization has picked up speed, which would inevitably become more and more used during the length of time it took to find either terraform Mars or find a new home, and cyberization would be an effective way of quickly adapting to a new environment.

Humanity, as a whole, would change. It was fact. Everyone knew it and faced it with grim attitudes.

So an identity was invaluable, however minor it might have seemed. A few weeks of deliberation had decided that their new name would be Terran, an umbrella name that many people adopted in an attempt to make leaving their home planet easier.

More than that, however, it was expected to find life elsewhere in the galaxy, regardless of whether that life was intelligent or not. It was decided that whatever the case, a unified government would be needed to properly represent the Terrans. To that end, the remnants of the UN pulled together resources and political clout to create a new organization, the United Terran Government, or UTG, as the political representative of the Terran race. A subset of the UTG is the United Nations Interstellar Coalition, or UNIC, and is classified as the military, exploratory, and scientific arm of the UTG.

'Fortes Fortuna Juvat,' Fortune Favors the Bold, becomes the motto of the UTG, whereas UNIC favors the more militaristic side of their branch - 'Per Mare, Per Terras, Per Constellatum,' or By Sea, By Land, By the Stars.

The very first ship of the First Defense Fleet was the Merlin, Warlock-class destroyer and exploration vessel. Two hundred meters long and fifty meters tall, she was large enough that she was equipped with state-of-the-art sensors and long-range communication suite; it was entirely possible for the ship to communicate with Earth, with only a three second lag time. Still, the Merlin was an experiment, and so she only had a light assortment of weapons. There was a six-pack of Lancer torpedoes installed on weapon mounts on both sides of the hull, given that the ship lacked any other heavier armaments – it was deemed that twelve torpedoes the size of small houses, each with a three megaton yield, would satisfy. To defend herself from incoming asteroids, the Merlin was equipped with double-barreled 20mm point defense cannons, slaved to targeting systems accurate to within a few millimeters. Finally, her entire hull was coated in twenty centimeters of Titanium-A armor plating, titanium smelted with a heavy concentration of lommite to create the densest material known to man. Not even a 120mm APFSDS round from an M1A1 Abrams had been able to penetrate the armor, only causing the slightest dent.

And that was a mere five centimeters of Titanium-A.

In truth, her weapons and armor were merely a formality. Dozens of analysts back on Earth had determined that the odds of humanity encountering an alien race were one in a million, and that Misato was just being paranoid. After all, dozens of factors went into whether or not a world could sustain life. It was astronomically improbable that another species was within a hundred lightyears, let alone the entire galaxy.

It was, simply put, impossible.

But laws had to be followed, and thanks to Misato's Slow Expansionism, it was required that at least one military installation had to be present at all research facilities, as well as building a dedicated shipyard capable to servicing a fleet.

The Merlin, having made the trip from Earth in a mere five hours, began her deceleration burn to rendezvous with Gagarin Station. Little did her fifty-man crew realize was that she would be in the epicenter of an event that would usher in a new age of humanity, one of strife, chaos, and hope.


	5. Convergence

JULY 4TH, 2149

2115 HOURS EARTH STANDARD TIME

WARLOCK-CLASS DESTROYER

 _UNIC MERLIN_

ORBIT OF PLUTO

-O-O-O-

Captain Jacob Keyes had a rule. It just one rule, one simple to follow, but hard to accomplish. Still, it had served him well during his rise through the ranks of the UNIC.

'Luck and tactical awareness go hand in hand.'

It wasn't chance that got him noticed; it was his dogged determination throughout his stint at the academy that got him to an accelerated position, on the first Terran space warship, no less. He might not have been the top of the class, but he could get things done without any qualms or hesitation. Apparently, being decisive was something that the higher-ups looked for – the same could not be said for those who flunked out. Either way, Keyes made his own luck, which was something he was happy to do than rely on chance alone. It was why he was scrolling through his data pad and relaying orders even before the Merlin had begun her deceleration. He didn't want to take anything to chance, not when he was approaching his rendezvous with Gagarin Station.

"Report status," he barked.

Fingers fired away across their keyboards, becoming little more than a blur.

"All engines green – hydrogen fusion reactor online. Nuclear conversion stable."

"Long-range scanners operating within normal parameters. We're getting chatter from Gagarin; we can hail at any time."

"Weapons cold and stowed."

Keyes nodded, then turned to the woman operating the weapons station. "Bring them online. I'm not leaving ourselves without any options."

With a grin, the woman operating the weapons station began flicking toggles. "Lancer torpedoes one through twelve are hot! Nuclear reaction detected in all point-defense cannons – Tachyon density is rising. We'll be ready to fire in five."

There was something he didn't like about the situation. He couldn't place his finger on it, but he knew something was going to happen. Like his mantra, his gut instincts rarely led him astray. Eyeing the row of workstations before him and the technicians who manned them, Keyes didn't dare let himself relax, or even sit at the captain's console behind him. It might've had the same data that any of the other stations had, but he preferred to be walking among his crew. Have his feet on the ground, as it were.

No matter what, however, he just hoped that what they accomplished today would help save their race. Even with the fleet that was slowly being built up back home – with lessons learned during the construction of the _Merlin_ taken into account – they were running out of time. Whatever they did today would decide the direction their species could go.

Jacob Keyes could only hope that it would be the right one.

-O-O-O-

Shepard's boots clanked with every step as she strode down a metal grated corridor, wasting little time as she dodged technicians. It was a big moment for all of them, and despite the incomplete state of the station, none of them wanted to leave anything to chance. Footage would be streamed back to the Admiralty back on Earth, so the need for perfection was doubly so. Seeing the need for urgency, Shepard had relented and collapsed her rigging in the bulky, squarish block of Titanium-A affixed to her back and continually sent out weak radar pulses from the thick, metal band that laid across the back of her head, looking for the halls that had the least amount of people. At a jogging pace, she'd reach the bridge relatively quickly. Perhaps she shouldn't have been strolling around with her cannons in full view, but damn did it feel good to stretch out. It was funny – though her Outfit was merely steel and titanium, it had felt ungodly stiff when she'd first attached herself.

She made her way down a hall and up a flight of stairs, and after a short elevator ride, found herself only a few levels down from the bridge. The problem now was that, as she got closer, more people were scrambling to prepare before the operation began – the corridor she was on was utter chaos as people pushed and shoved their way through the throng, and only promised to get worse the closer she got to the bridge.

"Great," Shepard muttered to herself, ducking into a recessed hatch for a maintenance tunnel. She was barely able to fit with her cannons on her back, even with them collapsed, yet this thought was far from her mind as she eyed the workers from her safe haven. "Should've come sooner, this is a mad house…"

" _If you think this is insane you should check out the AI Chamber. I swear, these guys think I'm going to crash any second now."_

The voice came from the intercom at Shepard's elbow, tinny and echoing through the tiny speaker.

Shepard frowned. "Misato?"

" _What other random voice would talk out of the blue? Of course you might also be developing psychosis, but that's a whole other can of worms,"_ the AI sarcastically remarked.

"Funny."

The AI sniggered. _"Having issues?"_

"I nearly stepped on some guy's foot – how do you think I'm doing?" Shepard snapped.

" _Urgh. Ouch. That would've hurt,"_ Misato muttered, infuriating Shepard with her statement of the obvious. _"Of course, it doesn't help that your body is held together with about one and a half tons of hyper-condensed 20_ _th_ _century rolled homogenous battle plate nanofilament. And another three in Titanium-A."_

Shepard, through her irritation, could picture the AI shuddering.

" _I mean, just… squish."_

"Misato…" Shepard grumbled.

" _Like a bug."_

"Misato!" Shepard scolded. "Unless you have a better idea than me plowing through these people, go bother someone else!" the Shipgirl hissed at the control panel, earning several curious glances as people passed her by.

" _Yeesh, touchy. Fine – if you go through maintenance I can get you a direct route to the CIC. Just follow my little buddy,"_ Misato quickly said, before the intercom clicked off.

Shepard quirked an eyebrow. "'Buddy?'"

As if on cue, the hatch slid open with a hiss of hydraulics. Though the tunnel within was pitch black, Shepard could see what had come to greet her through the gloom; a bipedal, yellow robot that had probably seen better days, its paint faded and chipped and limbs dented in multiple places, yet the machine seemed to function perfectly fine as it turned its blocky, cyclops head to her and scanned her its single glowing eye.

 _A Marvin? I thought those were decommissioned._

"Yamato-class Shepard?" the Marvin unit asked, its voice flat and grating. With its body perfectly still, the only way for Shepard to judge it was the cartoonish yellow smiley face emblazoned on the screen in its chest.

Shepard nodded. "Yes?"

"I have instructions to escort you to the command deck. Please follow me," the machine said, before it promptly spun on its heel to venture back into the darkness of the maintenance corridor, forcing Shepard to chase after it. The Marvin had the presence of mind to activate the miniature spotlights on its shoulders and chest, lighting up the drab, machinery-filled tunnel.

The Marvin's strides were long and efficient, though they were easy enough for Shepard to keep up with. The maintenance tunnel, meanwhile, was a whole other story – it was like a city unto itself, a maze of crisscrossing, narrow corridors that had but the barest of ambient lighting from the flickering lights and groans of working machinery, the access ports of which jutted out slightly into the corridor. Indents lined the walls occasionally, the purpose of which apparent when she passed one and noticed another red colored Marvin tucked into the alcove only for it to continue on its way as soon as they passed, moving on to its appointed duties.

Shepard didn't know why, but something about the upcoming operation was making her uneasy. She understood it at a basic level – humanities greatest scientific minds would board the most advanced ship built by humanity, fire off an alien radio frequency at Charon, and hope that nothing went wrong. Herself and Melina were merely there as figureheads for whenever footage was released to the public. But, something just felt _wrong,_ and for the life of her she couldn't figure out why. She was put somewhat at ease since she had her cannons, but it was bugging her to no end.

Lost in thought, the Marvin had led her down another hall, taking a left, and up a ladder to the next level of the station before Shepard felt… _it._ It was at the very edge of her perception, but she felt It. Alarmed, and hoping against hope she was wrong, Shepard's eyes glowed before she sent out a powerful burst of sonar and radar, the twin pulses coursing their way through Gagarin.

Almost immediately the Marvin halted in its tracks and its head spun a full 180 degrees, its single eye giving her a baleful glower. More than that, Shepard could hear the mechanical screeches of other Marvin units, ones networked together, as their connections were suddenly severed before they fell like dominoes, their falls echoing through the tunnels.

" _Jane Shepard, what the hell do you think you're doing?!"_ Misato's voice screamed through the Marvin unit. _"You just knocked out half the station!"_

Ignoring them, Shepard concentrated on her readings, translated half by her and half by the presence that shared her body.

 _Mass tonnage: 11,840,000 long tons (est)._

 _3,178 biological units detected._

 _1,932 synthetic units detected._

 _WARNING: 1 anomaly detected._

A sharp ping echoed back to Shepard, making the lights flicker.

" _And there goes the other half! Fuck!"_

"Where is it," Shepard muttered.

The sonar, unlike the radar, had to travel through each and every barrier before it could return a reading – this made it much less like a quick glance that the radar gave, and more of an in-depth look of what exactly was going on. Due to its nature sonar was rarely used on land, but it was invaluable when searching for something in an area that made it otherwise impossible to search quickly… such as an incomplete space station.

 _Reading detected: 37 degrees off starboard bow, six o'clock. Distance, 600 meters._

The Marvin turned to face Shepard. _"Shepard, will you fucking answer me? What the hell is going on?"_ Misato growled.

"Misato, what's six hundred meters below us?" Shepard demanded, brushing aside the AI's question.

After a long pause, Misato sighed. _"You better have a damn good reason for this… it's Hanger Four, why?"_

Shepard's blood chilled. "…Please don't tell me that the Merlin is docking there."

" _Uh… it is?"_

She muttered a curse under her breath, before she looked back to the Marvin and barked, "I need to get to the bridge _now._ Priority one."

-O-O-O-

It breathed, letting out a shudder. The Warmaiden had almost sensed It, which was something It couldn't have, not when It was so close. Dressed in baggy coveralls and jacket, It hid among cargo containers in the Reclaimer's metal monstrosity, having overheard that their newest Lady was coming to partake of some kind of grand experiment. Knowing the sheer destruction that their Light had wrought on them, the Hive simply couldn't leave them to their own devices. So, the Hive had done something unprecedented – it thought like a Reclaimer. Needing information, the Hive bred a new type of Child, an Interloper that could dig deep into the Reclaimer's defenses.

It had done so.

All It had to do now was wait for the perfect moment.

-O-O-O-

The bridge of Gagarin Station was somewhat similar to ones in the original seafaring vessels before they were destroyed by the Abyssals, overlooking the main body of the station below. It was based around a central pillar of computer mainframes and the primary elevator, with computer consoles radiating outward in sections – Life Support, Security, Communications, Engineering, and General Administration, though this was mostly handled by Misato, the station's Synthesized Intelligence. In fact, she had a hand in all of the station's workings, though most higher level management was left to humans.

The bridge was, in actuality, an offshoot from the main body of the station. Offset like it was, the wraparound transparisteel partition of the bridge offered a stunning view of the cosmos, as well as the station below.

Vice Admiral Andrew del Rio, a stocky man who was balding before his time, was admiring this view when the maintenance hatch to the mainframe behind him was pounded out of its frame, courtesy of an armor-clad foot, and followed by an irate young woman who pulled herself through the opening despite the utility Marvin attempting to hold her back.

" _Admiral!"_ she roared, shoving the robot off her.

Virtually all activity stopped, everyone turning to stare at the angry Shipgirl. Del Rio merely frowned and demanded, "Yamato-class Shepard, what the hell are you doing?"

The Marvin approached Shepard once more and gently grabbed her elbow. _"Shepard, stop,"_ it said in Misato's voice, trying to warn her.

It's hand was brushed off, and Shepard confidently strode towards the Vice Admiral. "I apologize for the intrusion Vice Admiral, but I needed to report to you immediately," she stated, before coming stop with her feet spread and hands clasped behind her back in parade rest.

Del Rio frowned and checked his watch. "I'd say you should, Shepard – it's 2155 hours," he commented, and glared from behind his Admiral's cap. "However, being late doesn't excuse you for kicking in an armored security door."

"This couldn't wait," she insisted, though she couldn't help but wince at the Admiral's words. "I have reason to believe that there is an Abyssal presence on this station."

One could have heard a pin drop in the silence that ensued. Nearly ten seconds had passed before Del Rio sighed. "So," he began skeptically, "you begin an altercation with Shipgirl Melina, you tour the station with your cannons in plain view, you send the station into _chaos_ with both a radar and sonar pulse, and you expect me to believe that an Abyssal, a mindless, bloodthirsty monster, has somehow wandered its way through a starport, boarded an HLLV, and missed detection on board the most highly secured facility in human history, and all the while humanities best and brightest have been sitting around with their thumbs up their asses?"

He snorted. "If you weren't a Shipgirl I'd court-martial you. As it stands, as Vice Admiral of the British Fleet I'm tempted to strike you from active duty. _Permanently_."

Each incident made Shepard cringe, but she recovered herself with a calming breath. "Admiral, may I speak freely?"

The Vice Admiral pointedly turned from her, tapping away at the datapad in his hands. "You may not."

At once, Shepard's face twisted with fury before she reined herself in. "Vice Admiral," she said carefully, "You don't understand. I felt something on this station. We Shipgirls _feel_ the presence of the Abyssals. I don't know how and I don't know why, but something that shouldn't be here _is here_. You can't just –"

"What I don't understand is why you're still attempting to convince me of something that _doesn't exist_ , Shepard," Del Rio said, refusing to look up.

"You're damning every single person on this station!" Shepard snapped, her fury finally showing itself on her face – her anger even made her cannons react, with several panels snapping open to release boiling steam.

Del Rio finally looked to her, though if he was afraid of the three and a half ton woman that could bend steel as if it were paper, he didn't show it. "Remove yourself from the bridge and await further instructions in Hanger Four," he growled.

"But sir, I –"

" _That is an order,"_ Del Rio intoned, coming within inches of Shepard's face. "Put _one more foot_ out of line today, and I'll recommend you for scrapping."

Shepard did nothing for a moment, the seriousness of his threat sending a trill of terror through both her and her ship spirit, before she schooled herself into icy impassiveness. "Yes _sir,"_ she said, and snapped her arm up in a sloppy salute before she spun on her heel and strode to the waiting elevator, flanked on both sides by a nervous security guard with a bulky rifle in their hands, attached to an equally bulky pack strapped to their backs by a thick hose.

"At ease, officers," she said, smiling somewhat to put the men as ease as she passed them.

As soon as the elevator closed, Shepard slapped her forehead with a thunderclap of metal. "Stupid, egotistical _moron._ How the hell did he get to Vice Admiral?"

" _Well, it certainly wasn't based on any merit of his. Admiral Lord Terrance Hood owed the man's father a few favors. Vice Admiral Del Rio is… acceptable, but he's more of a manager than a leader,_ " Misato said from the elevator's intercom, having abandoned the Marvin back in the bridge. _"He's not really inspiring, is he?"_

"More like insulting," Shepard spat.

" _True. So what's the plan?"_

Shepard raised an eyebrow. "I thought you were the all-powerful AI? Aren't you the one supposed to be making the plans?" she joked.

Misato chuckled. _"That's SI, just so ya know. And I'd love to, but I don't really have any specialized Abyssal detection equipment on the station so I can't help you there. Are you positive that you sensed an Abyssal here? 'Cause if there isn't and you do something, you're fucked –"_

"– And if there is and I _don't_ do something, we're also fucked," Shepard finished. "Del Rio is a fool. I know I felt something, Misato. It put chills down my spine, I _know_ it's an Abyssal." She slammed a fist into her palm. "That _thing_ doesn't belong on this station. Besides, it's not like I'm disobeying orders if I head to Hangar Four."

She paused. "But… how the hell did he know about me and Melina?"

Misato's logic processors froze for several milliseconds. _"Erm… he must've been looking at the security cameras…"_ she mumbled, sheepish.

"…Misato?"

" _Yeah?"_

"You suck."

" _Oh, fuck you."_

-O-O-O-

Gagarin Station, even incomplete as it was, was otherwise fully functional. It boasted four docking hangars that were, in theory, capable of servicing any vessel. Granted, the Terran fleet currently had a grand total of one ship to its name, but a couple months of dedicated construction from a Rorqual-class would solve that readily enough. That was another reason for the mission; to test and find technologies that worked and others that didn't. So far, the only one that had been touch and go was the mass-altering properties of the new element uncovered within the alien cache on Mars, simply refusing to cooperate with the Titanium-A that comprised most of the structural and armor plating in the _Merlin._ Scientists had determined that the lommite used in the smelting process was simply unaffected, countering the mass-altering effect perfectly.

While primarily a research platform, Gagarin had a dedicated ore refining and manufacturing plant. Trailing through its walls were tunnels for constructors, small, AI-guided drones could quickly ferry components directly to where they were needed, invaluable for repair jobs or even ship construction. Of course, this was all in the background. The few occasions where most people remembered constructors being used were during the laying of the Rorqual-class mining ships, where their original purpose had been disposable recon and mining drones. These tunnels also happened to be part of the same network that the station's complement of Marvins used to make their own rounds, albeit lesser used ones.

Tucked away in a darkened alcove, It tried to make itself as small as possible as it watched the occasional constructor flit past. While it wasn't impossible for It to continue hiding in the actual hangar, Mother had instructed for It to hide in an area where It could easily make itself way into the Lady when She arrived. It was a decision the Hive fully supported. This endeavor simply couldn't fail, not just to know what the humans were planning to do with their Light, but for the survival of the entire Hive. The Great One's death at the bottom of the Deep Blue released the Hive from its servitude, but there was always the possibility that the Great Ones would return. If there was even the slightest chance that the humans had found a way to escape the grasp of the Hive, then the Hive would use it to escape the grasp of the Great Ones. One way, or another.

It took a slow, even breath. "We will… never… sink…"

-O-O-O-

" _Attention all hands, this is Vice Admiral Del Rio. The time is 2202, Operation Looking Glass has begun. UNIC Merlin will arrive within ten minutes. Remain on standby alert. That is all."_

"I may have had the wrong idea…" Shepard muttered to herself. Her plan had been to patrol Hangar Four to 'discourage' anyone or anything that would have wanted to cause any… shenanigans. She was, after all, a battleship, even if she had guns that she'd never fired.

Now that she thought about it, something had to be up with those things; the barrel was the right size, but the bore was so much narrower. The original Yamato had been equipped with 46 centimeter rifled cannons, reflected in Shepard's own cannons, though on a much smaller scale. She wasn't sure how it worked; _no one_ was sure how it worked, only that it did, much like how the Shipgirls simply were.

There were a good few decades that had scientists frothing at the mouth for the blatant disregard of physics.

Shepard's original Type 94's had a bore of around three inches. However, whatever the techies did had reduced the bore to an inch and seven eighths, which would have been roughly 20 centimeters full-scale, and she couldn't for the life of her figure out what they did. Perhaps it had something to do with the strange tingling she felt in her stomach, which had only grown stronger the longer she wore her Outfit. Perhaps it was simply her body integrating the adjustments that had been made, but she still didn't like it.

Either way, speculation wouldn't solve her current dilemma. The football field-sized hangar was positively bustling with activity, and it took Shepard all she could to keep from getting lost in the madness. Technicians raced towards their destinations, while mechanics waited alongside stacked crates and loaders to resupply the incoming vessel. She could see it now, through the rippling blue haze that separated the hangar from the pitiless abyss of space. Massive magnetic clamps had been lowered from the ceiling, having already been checked that they would not fail. Absolutely nothing had been left to chance.

Except that there was possibly an Abyssal that had somehow gotten on the station.

Shepard resisted the urge to growl as she scanned the screens. She couldn't very well alert all these people that there was something on the station, as it would simply cause undue panic that she _really_ couldn't afford. And she couldn't let off another radar pulse without knocking out something that might be important.

Admittedly, she'd already done so.

Regardless, she had a soulless monster to find. Abyssals never acted without purpose, so whatever had drawn it to Hangar Four – alone, with all the witnesses and guards with weapons that could severely damage it – could only mean one thing: there was something it wanted on the incoming ship. It had taken her several minutes to think this through, and by the time she did, the _Merlin_ was already closing in to the station. It would have been foolhardy to try to patrol the entire hangar even if there was no one in it, let alone packed full of people and on a time limit. Without the use of her radar equipment she needed as many eyes as she could get, so she'd planted herself in one of the hangar's overview stations, a two-story tower that offered not only a much better view of the hangar, but it also controlled a good portion of the station's constructor droids. The tower was merely one of four, one at each corner, and Yamato had taken the one that would have been at the _Merlin's_ portside nose.

The technician who manned the tower, a portly man that strained the seams of his overalls, nervously shuffled his feet as he said, "U-um… I _really_ don't think you should be here."

"I have a mission, now shut up and keep an eye on the door," Shepard snapped, eyeing the holographic screens that wrapped around the control room. Each screen was showing a live feed taken from a constructor droid, shifting every few seconds to a different one. Almost three hundred constructors had been given orders to remain on 'standby' in the hangar, where in reality they were Shepard's eyes in the sky, watching for something, anything. So far she'd been unsuccessful, and it was pissing her off to no end.

Especially when she kept getting chills down her spine. It _had_ to be here. And it had better show up soon, otherwise the portly technician would have a front row seat to what happened when a control console was introduced to a fist empowered with 72,000 tons of furious Japanese-American steel.

-O-O-O-

 _Hey-o! Sorry it took so long, real life over here and the fact that my brain won't stay focused on a single idea. Plus Space Engineers. That thing's like Legos on crack._

 _Anyway, I planned to have a whole fight scene in this chapter, but I thought that this would be a good break without going another two freakin' months. Before we continue, however, I'd like to explain a little science. At least, how I figure it. It's my story, so I reserve the right to fib. You're welcome to skip this tidbit if you don't want to read it, it's not vital to know. It's mostly for myself, anyways._

 _Positron Cannons. How they work is that they jumpstart a nuclear reaction inside the barrel, which is obviously sealed at the end. As the reaction builds, particles get a little wibbly-wobbly and build energy of their own – since they have nowhere to go, they're stuck building up steam. Like, potential energy to the max. A good amount of magnetism controls how much the reaction feeds itself, preventing it from getting out of hand and consuming the barrel. This would obviously be bad. Anyway, once the reaction reaches critical mass – or however much its allowed to grow – the barrel is opened and all those particles stuck building up energy suddenly have an exit. They shoot out like bullets, carrying the radiation with them, and hit the target at near-light speeds. It's like a directed nuclear weapon. This is basically how the Zeus cannon destroyed itself – it built up too much energy, and melted itself to slag when it fired. Even the Abyssal's freakish regeneration and immunity to conventional weapons wouldn't hold up to that kind of bombardment._

 _Another point of contention for myself is the hydrogen reactors. Hydrogen is used in real-life, both in fuel cells and reactors, but I wasn't clear enough with myself which was which. I'm divided because reactors are fucking huge. Chernobyl was the size of a town for a reason. What I need to clarify is what the 'reactors' that were installed on the Shipgirls actually are. One reactor would be able to fit an entire ship in it, so no. What the Shipgirls got were hydrogen fuel cells, more efficient than coal or fossil fuels, and upgraded their boilers to liquid-cooled hydrogen-injected ICE's to take advantage of the hydrogen and still be capable of using the Syracuse cannons, and only need to drink water to refuel. Sort of like Halo's Warthogs. Of course, there's also what Shepard has, but it's a surprise…_

 _XD_

 _Granted, I know this isn't how shit works in real life, but this isn't real life, now is it? Things would get boring if I spent eleven pages describing this shit in detail. Like Tolkien on a door. A brilliant man, but holy shit was he dry._

 _There have been some concerns brought up by you guys. Namely, how the Terrans survive the Reaper War, and the lack of American Shipgirl presence. The first one would be major spoilers if I answer it in full, so let me just explain how they survive the Abyssals – since it will come up in the next chapter, this shouldn't be too much of an issue. Plus I'd like to answer it now, given that I'll most likely forget. First off, their escape builds off several technologies that are going to be coming in the decade between this chapter and the deadline to the Apocalypse; ship construction, cyberization, and AI (or SI) implementation. This entire time, humanity have been experimenting different ways to build ships, but a major constraint was the weight. The bigger the ship, the more it takes to move it, which makes it even heavier. Element Zero counters this, but has only been discovered for a year and they quickly find that it is ineffective for many of the designs they have, either due to size or materials used._

 _What happens is that people are scrambling to optimize this new technology, which suddenly makes big ships viable. Of course, the whole ordeal next chapter turns them off implementing it everywhere, which I won't go into because reasons. When Misato diverted processing power to her 'secret project', in reality she was designing a supersized colony ship that can carry as many people as possible. The design I'm basing the ship off of is TMC-Deluxe's Horizon Colony Ship, from DeviantArt. For a point of reference, the scale I'm using are the pylons along the ship's spine – my guess is that each pylon is around 500 meters apart from the other, roughly the length of a UNSC Paris-class heavy frigate, give or take another 1500 meters for the ship's nose and stern. All in all the ship is 6420 meters long, plus that rough estimate puts the ship at almost eight kilometers. Ludicrous as it may be, there is reasoning for this – the Rorqual-class mining ships. There are already six of them, doing nothing but stockpiling resources. Almost one hundred years has the Terrans sitting pretty on a very nice bit of stuff to work with, and if all the Rorqual-class focus their efforts on building the Horizon, each carrying several thousand construction robots, things get done quick._

 _Of course, even a ship of that size would only be able to carry so many people. By my estimate, only around five hundred to six hundred thousand people, let alone 1.5 billion. Of course, I don't want to give away everything, but I will explain how the Terrans go about this. Cyberization interfaces technology directly with people's brains a la GiTS, but someone has the bright idea to combine the technology with SI creation. The end result is that people can freely jump out of their own brains and wander the Interwebs, making them a sort of digital race. That's the whole plan – a select few of the population will run the ship and eventual fleet, while the majority of the populace dumps their brains into a massive server farm on the colony ship and run the electronic side of things, with the promise that they will receive new bodies. Sort of like Soma, but without the creepy goo. Of course, this is just a temporary measure to make sure to save as many people as possible. As more ships are constructed, blocks of the population will be pulled out of cyberspace into their new bodies, which would either be a cloned body using their original DNA map for a normal citizen or a cybernetic-augmented body if they decide to join the navy. Of course, some people will decide to head to Mars, but its only one city with a limited amount of resources, and it would take a tremendous amount of time to expand. Since by this point the asteroid belt will be mostly depleted of ore, the fleet will head to destinations unknown, gathering resources and planting the roots of viable colonies as they wander the stars._

 _Next is the lack of American Shipgirls. I can't go into too much detail, but think about it – the Abyssals had to come from somewhere, the deep obviously, but there's a reason why the entire Western continent is nothing but an Abyssal factory. I'm not saying they turned into Abyssals (which is debatable given the end of the last episode), but when you have a limited number of them against a growing horde, in what is basically ground zero, things get pretty hopeless. Any American Shipgirls would have been killed fairly early on, but as Kitakami and Ooi have proven, don't count them out just yet._

 _Last note. Terran ships will be predominantly ships from the Halo universe. They're big, ugly, and have a nice big anti-son-of-a-bitch cannon. Gotta love those. That said, I'm open to suggestions._

 _Anyway, that's all for now. Thanks for reading. Oh, and make sure to put in your votes soon. The poll is closing with the next chapter. As it stands, the Quarians will meet the humans (Terrans) first, with the Krogan and Asari tied for second. Even if this doesn't change, I have a few ideas in mind._

 _-RYNO_


End file.
